Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Read Online Free Page B

she didn’t say so. She stayed with us frequently in the flat, helping my mum with me and generally making herself useful until getting a post in Berlin, to work with the Control Commission.
    Though we’d moved in with just a few suitcases, in time a few sticks of furniture were acquired, mostly with the help of The Old Man, who had useful contacts everywhere.
    Furniture, like many things, was rationed. So, like the bombed out or evacuated masses, we made do with the bare minimum, mostly second-hand: a rickety wardrobe, an ancient gas cooker, some crockery, linens, mostly sourced from nearby market stalls, a few ornaments the sisters had managed to pack up and bring from Leeds.
    My little cot was in the corner of the main bedroom where my mum slept. When with us, Sarah slept in the tiny damp second bedroom facing the street – the space that eventually became my room.
    Heating in the flat came from small coal fires, tiny grates in thirties-tiled fireplaces in the living room and the main bedroom. The flat had a bathroom with a bath, toilet and sink. But constant hot running water was an undreamed of luxury. All hot water was boiled on the gas stove. (Our Ascot water heater didn’t arrive until quite a few years later.) The pocket-sized kitchen boasted very little, no fridge, microwave, washing machine or dishwasher; these were, of course, light years away. The main household appliance, apart from a kettle, was the mangle, the contraption you had to have to wring out the washing and get it to a semi-dry state.
    Basically, the kitchen was just a sink with cold running water, the gas cooker and a pantry with several shelves for storage of crockery and food. Had you peered inside our pantry in those days you’d have found gold-coloured tins of powdered eggs from the US and sickly sweet orange juice bottles amid the meagre assortment of vegetables, mostly potatoes, which weren’t rationed but were still hard to find sometimes, and carrots, which were also not rationed and were plentiful (people believed that eating carrots helped you see better in the blackout years); plus small amounts of butter and cheese, carefully wrapped up in crumpled greaseproof paper.
    I bonded with Sarah in those early months; for a while she and my mum formed my entire world. One day, without warning, at just over a year old, I stood up in the little cot and opened my mouth.
    ‘Sis,’ I ventured, my mum’s nickname for Sarah, much to the sisters’ delight. It wasn’t long before I was proudly informing passers-by, ‘I’m 18 months.’ BBC radio, of course, was an early educational and musical influence: along with 26 million others, we tuned in to the Light Programme record request show Two-Way Family Favourites each Sunday at midday; the signature tune ‘With a Song in My Heart’ was the prelude to the traditional Sunday roast across the country throughout the late forties and fifties. My first ever attempt at recitation came after I struggled to mimic the announcer reading out the Shipping Forecast: ‘Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger’ – faraway places that were meaningless to us. Yet the sounds, heard day after day, week in, week out, meant the words were processed, fixed firmly in my memory.
    Money was tight. My mum’s sole income as a soldier’s wife with a child was a small allowance, so we were heavily subsidised by my dad’s parents. Each Friday, they’d organise a major food delivery – carrier bags from Petticoat Lane delivered to our front door by one of her father-in-law’s army of ‘runners’ from the ‘Lane’ as we called it, men who worked as casual delivery men, mostly for The Old Man’s betting business, usually collecting cash or betting slips from punters in pubs and on street corners. Inside the carrier bags were all manner of foodstuffs mostly off the ration books via the ‘black market’: fish and meat, eggs, butter (the ration of two ounces didn’t go very far) and any delicacies they could procure