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

‘bringing the boys home’ started mid-1945, but it wasn’t until early 1947 that the demob finally ended. Exhausted, broke and surrounded by the debris of nearly six years of war, what were my dad’s career prospects?
    A knockabout East-End roisterer who’d only opted to settle down when war broke out – ‘Ginger and I got married because everyone else was doing it’ – was my mum’s somewhat romantic take on their courtship, which had started in the late thirties and had been, for much of the time, an on-off situation.
    A steady bloke he wasn’t. The younger Ginger often worked ‘on the knocker’, selling goods door to door all over south-east England, so he was frequently away. He’d only reluctantly joined his dad in the betting business just before war broke out, preferring the freedom of the road to any real commitment.
    Yet as they courted in the late thirties, he became fiercely attached to my mum, who was five years his junior; petite, dark, slim and fashionably turned out, she was a bit of a man magnet. And her cheerful, easy-going manner was equally attractive. As their relationship developed, my dad had a somewhat disturbing habit of sending one or two close friends to my mum’s house to ‘keep an eye on Molly’ when his knockabout life meant he’d be unavailable. Even during the war, when they’d started married life in a bedsit in Finsbury Park in London, his posting to Kent meant they weren’t together very much. On leave, he’d head for the pub most nights. So in a way, he’d led a semi-bachelor existence for years, his passions typical of the times: boxing, soccer, pubs, and lots of laughs. Even in Meerut, he’d managed to indulge himself with visits to the races, placing bets and playing soccer. (He sent us many photos to prove it.)
    Now here he was in his mid-thirties, living full-time with a wife and a small child. One hundred per cent responsibility, which I suspect gave him the willies.
    Though he’d left school at fourteen and was poorly educated, my dad had a head for figures and a talent for words – his letters home to my mum from India were beautifully written – so he could, at a push, have found steady work in a clerical position in an office after the war. He’d got brownie points from his superiors in the Pay Corps. ‘The Army always wanted Ging,’ my mum would frequently tell me as I grew up, her badge of pride that his destiny as a street bookie could easily have been otherwise.
    But, of course, as a typical East Ender who’d grown up in Petticoat Lane around long-term duckers and divers with varying degrees of commercial success, the disciplined confines of army life, regular if low pay, and with some sort of permanence ahead, had scant appeal for my dad. And he needed cash. Fast. There was a wife and kid to consider now. So he took up the first offer that came his way – to work alongside his dad in Jack’s betting business.
    The betting laws of the time were draconian: technically, it was only legal to place a bet if you were at the racecourse or the dog track. Well-heeled punters could legally run an account and have credit with a ‘commission agent’ working out of an office – but the commission agent was only permitted to take bets by phone. Out on the street or in the pub, handing over cash to place bets on dogs or horses was technically illegal, right up until the early sixties.
    But there was a great deal of money to be made illegally because back then, betting on ‘the geegees’, or horses (and, to a lesser extent, the dogs) was more or less a national pastime. Gambling a few bob from their weekly pay was the working man’s one and only chance to improve his lot. The football pools had also started by then – but the daily or weekly bet was incredibly popular everywhere, just like the Lottery is nowadays.
    This national passion for the odd bet meant that Ginger and The Old Man were in a prime position to exploit the post-war hunger for illegal