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

dress is ruined with stains, an early sign of the slobbery that never quite left me.
    ‘Oh God, Ging, she’s eaten the lot!’ moans Molly.
    ‘Aah, don’t worry Mol, I knew she’d love ’em,’ says my dad, who at thirty four knows a lot about doing arithmetic and placing bets on ‘geegees’, but has much to learn about raising kids.
    But the reality is, of course, I have eaten far too many in one go. And the consequences of this are dramatic, if somewhat delayed.
    For the very next morning, as the returned soldier lies sleeping, my mum decides to pop out with me to the newsagents in Shacklewell Lane. ‘We’ll go get daddy a paper,’ she tells me.
    But on the way back, just as we reach our block of flats, I start to wail. To put it in the simplest terms, my body decides to shed itself of the unaccustomed load. Right there. All over the pavement.
    Up the stone stairs Molly drags me, screaming like a banshee, a hideous yellow trail of smelly poo in our wake. Not only have I managed to shame us publicly on the first morning of my dad’s return, the evidence is there for the delectation of our neighbours.
    ‘Now I’ll have to go down there and clean it up,’ Molly fumes, before marching me into the bathroom to hurriedly clean and change me.
    And later, as she kneels on the stairs with brush and pail, furiously scrubbing the evidence of my greed away, sure enough, our most detested neighbour, Maisie the ground-floor shrew, stands there and takes a pop.
    ‘Gotta bit of a tummy problem your little Jacky, eh Mrs Hyams?’ she lobs at my mum.
    My mum doesn’t answer, just carries on scrubbing, seething inwardly. It’s a nasty, if somewhat unhygienic, task, removing the evidence of your daughter’s greed, there for all to see. And she feels slightly guilty for not realising beforehand the implications of indulging my chocolate frenzy.
    ‘Shame, really. And your ‘usband just back ’ome, is ’e?’ continues Maisie, determined to exploit every second of our shame, already planning to circulate the latest morsel of gossip about that snooty woman and her little curly-haired brat.
    Right from day one, we’d stuck out like sore thumbs in the confined, narrow street – far too well dressed, too many overflowing carrier bags coming to our door – and this is a triumphant moment for her. In fact, it’s the defining moment in our relationship for the years ahead.
    ‘Yeah, Ginger’s back now,’ says Molly grimly, longing to throw the contents of the smelly bucket right in her neighbour’s face but just about managing to contain herself.
    ‘We’ll probably be moving soon,’ she says, half to herself, half to her loathsome neighbour.
    ‘Hah! You’ll be lucky!’ spits Maisie as a parting shot before retreating to the murky interior of her ground floor cave.
    They never spoke again, not once in the decades that followed. Maisie’s son, Alf, a scrawny scruff around my age, was pointedly ignored by us too if we encountered them on the stairs. I never had a conversation with him, nor did I want to; he was a bit too smelly, too much of a ruffian, for comfort.
    Yet Maisie was a bit of a witch in some ways. Her prediction was eerily accurate.
    There never was a move from the damp flat for my mother, not until forty-four years later when the removal van arrived to help move her to a better, warmer flat in a nearby security building.
    And while other post-war kids might remember the day their unknown soldier dad came home with delight or bewilderment – the divorce rate in England and Wales soared once the demob was over, from l2,314 in 1944 to 60,190 in 1947 – my memories are only of a strange, skinny man with an enormous box of chocolates. And a vivid lesson in the nasty consequences of overindulgence.

CHAPTER 4
B ETS A RE O N
     
    M y dad was one of the later returnees to civilian life post World War II. Five million men and women had served in the British Armed Forces. The somewhat slow, frustrating process of