When I did come home early I read to the children, always Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. Amy and Alex were Noddy experts. Amy loved the ‘Noddy quiz’.
She would say, ‘Daddy, what was Noddy wearing the day he met Big Ears?’
I’d pretend to think for a minute. ‘Was he wearing his red shirt?’
Amy would say, ‘No.’
I’d tell her that was a very hard question and I needed to think. ‘Was he wearing his blue hat with the bell on the end?’ Another no. Then I’d click my fingers. ‘I know! He was wearing his blue shorts and his yellow scarf with red spots.’
‘No, Daddy, he wasn’t.’
At that point I’d give in and ask Amy to tell me what he was wearing. Before she could get the words out, she was already giggling. ‘He wasn’t wearing anything, he was … naked!’
And then she’d put her hand over her mouth to stifle her hysterical laughing. No matter how many times we played that game it never varied.
We weren’t one of those families that had the TV on for the sake of it. There was always music playing and I sang around the house. We used to get the kids to put on little shows for us. I’d introduce them and Janis would clap and they’d start singing – well, I say singing … Alex couldn’t sing but would give it a go, and Amy’s only goal was to sing louder than her brother. Clearly she liked the limelight. If Alex got bored and went off to do something else, Amy would carry on singing – even after we’d told her to stop.
She loved a little game I used to play with her – we did it a lot in the car. I’d start a song or nursery rhyme and she’d sing the last word.
‘Humpty Dumpty sat on the …’
‘… WALL …’
‘… Humpty Dumpty had a great …’
‘… FALL.’ It kept us amused for ages.
One year Amy was given a little turntable that played nursery rhymes. It was all you heard from her room. Then she had a xylophone and taught herself – slowly and painfully – to play ‘Home On The Range’. The noise would carry through the house, plink, plink, plink, and I’d will her to hit the right notes on time – it was agonizing to have to listen to it.
Despite her charm, ‘Be quiet, Amy!’ was probably the most-heard sentence in our house during her early years. She just didn’t know when to stop. Once she started singing that was it. And if she wasn’t the centre of attention, she’d find a way of becoming it – occasionally at Alex’s expense. At his sixth birthday party Amy, aged two, put on an impromptu show of singing and dancing. Naturally, Alex wasn’t best pleased and, before we could stop him, he poured a drink over her. Amy burst into tears and ran out of the room crying. I shouted at Alex so loudly that he ran out crying too. After the party, Amy sat on the kitchen floor sulking, and Alex wouldn’t come out of his room.
Despite such scenes, Alex and Amy were extremely close and remained so, even when they got older and made their own circles of friends.
Amy would do anything for attention. She was mischievous, bold and daring. Not long after Alex’s birthday party, Janis took Amy to Broomfield Park, near our home, and lost her. A panic-stricken Janis phoned me at work to tell me that Amy was missing and I raced to the park, beside myself with anxiety. By the time I arrived, the police were there and I was preparing myself for the worst: in my mind, she wasn’t lost, she’d been abducted. My mum and my auntie Lorna were also there – everybody was looking for Amy. Clearly, Amy was no longer in the park and the police told us to go home, which we did. Five hours later, Janis and I were crying our eyes out when the phone rang. It was Ros, one of my sister Melody’s friends. Amy was with her. Thank God.
What had happened was just typical of Amy. Ros had been in the park with her kids when Amy had seen her and run over to her. Naturally, Ros had asked where her mummy was, and mischievous Amy had told her that her mummy had gone home. So Ros took Amy home with her, but instead of phoning us, she phoned Melody, who was a teacher. She didn’t speak to her but left a message at the school that Amy was with her. When Melody heard that Ros was looking after Amy, she didn’t think too much about it because she had no idea that Amy was missing. When she got home and heard what had happened, she put two and two together. Fifteen minutes later, Melody walked in with Amy and I burst into tears.
‘Don’t cry, Daddy, I’m home now,’ I remember her saying.
Unfortunately, Amy didn’t seem to learn from that experience. Several months later I took the kids to the Brent Cross shopping centre in north-west London. We were in the John Lewis department store and suddenly Amy was gone. One second she was there and the next she’d disappeared. Alex and I searched the immediate area – how far could she have got? – but there was no sign of her. Here we go again, I thought. And this time she’d definitely been kidnapped.
We widened the search. Just as we were walking past a rack of long coats, out she popped. ‘Boo!’ I was furious, but the more I told her off, the more she laughed. A few weeks later she tried it again. This time I headed straight for the long coats. She wasn’t there. I searched all of the racks. No Amy. I was really beginning to worry when a voice said over the Tannoy, ‘We’ve got a little girl called Amy here. If you’ve lost her, please come to Customer Services.’ She’d hidden somewhere else, got really lost and someone had taken her to a member of staff. I told her there was to be no more hiding or running away when we’re out. She promised she wouldn’t do it again and she didn’t, but the next series of practical jokes was played out to a bigger audience.
When I was a little boy I had choked on a bit of apple and my father had panicked. So, when Alex choked on his dinner, I panicked too, forcing my fingers down his throat to remove whatever was obstructing him. It didn’t take Amy long to start the choking game. One Saturday afternoon we were shopping in Selfridges, in London’s Oxford Street. The store was packed. Suddenly Amy threw herself on to the floor, coughing and holding her throat. I knew she wasn’t really choking but she was creating such a scene that I threw her over my shoulder and we left in a hurry. After that she was ‘choking’ everywhere, friends’ houses, on the bus, in the cinema. Eventually, we just ignored it and it stopped.
* * *
Although I was born in north London, I’ve always considered myself to be an East Ender: I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents, Ben and Fanny Winehouse, at their flat above Ben the Barber, his business, in Commercial Street, or with my other grandmother, Celie Gordon, at her house in Albert Gardens, both in the heart of the East End. I even went to school in the East End. My father was a barber and my mother was a ladies’ hairdresser, both working in my grandfather’s shop, and, on their way there, they’d drop me off at Deal Street School.
Amy and Alex were fascinated by the East End so I took them there often. They loved me to tell them stories about our family, and seeing where they had lived brought the stories to life. Amy liked hearing about my weekends in the East End when I was a little boy. Every Friday I went with my mum and dad to Albert Gardens where we’d stay until Sunday night. The house was packed to the rafters. There was Grandma Celie, Great-grandma Sarah, Great-uncle Alec, Uncle Wally, Uncle Nat, and my mum’s twin, Auntie Lorna. If that wasn’t enough, a Holocaust survivor named Izzi Hammer lived on the top floor; he passed away in January 2012.
The weekends at Albert Gardens started with the traditional Jewish Friday night dinner: chicken soup, then roast chicken, roast potatoes, peas and carrots. Dessert was lokshen
