I learned later had been the result of diphtheria when he was young. It was adenoidal, strained, and he spoke very high, at the top of his throat. His throat had been burned away, or cauterised.
Both my parents were born in Hackney in the same year, 1910. Mum and Dad met first as teenagers, while very much later, in their forties, they both worked at Garnham’s department store in Walthamstow High Street, where Dad managed the crockery and hardware department and Mum was the boss’s secretary and a department supervisor.
‘It was the scout uniform,’ she would say. ‘To woo me your dad had a motorbike with a sidecar. He would come and collect me, and we would go out together.’
They had a modest wooing, with her on the pillion or sidecar. Sometimes my Auntie Hilda and Uncle Henry joined them.
War was declared in September 1939, a month before my first birthday. My memories go back to sitting in a pram when we first heard the air-raid sirens. Mum grabbed hold of me, swaddled and wrapped me up, then rushed me down the steps into the Anderson shelter.
I liked the wail of the sirens and never felt fear. Although we didn’t live in the area of dense, blanket bombing or the fire bombs that set the whole of Docklands on fire, there were explosions enough – flashes, sirens, wailing searchlights crossing the sky and picking out planes and barrage balloons. Somehow I was never affected. I was too young to feel or understand violent death and destruction as a presence.
Dozens of kids from where I lived were sent away in the early months of war with labels round their necks and a single change of clothing, accompanied by teachers, to board with strangers, but with no guarantee they could stay even with brothers and sisters, and not knowing when they would next see their fathers and mothers.
This never happened to me. I never stood on a station platform looking lost and forlorn with a label round my neck.
During the Blitz in 1940–41 I was still in Leytonstone. Dad, being over thirty, wasn’t called up for a while and, like millions of others, dug out and built an Anderson shelter in the back garden. It was purpose-made from sheets of corrugated iron bent into a semi-circular shape. Dad set it over a concrete base embedded two or three feet in the ground. It had no soak-away, but it had bunk beds on either side making four beds in total. Like others, Dad covered it with earth and a little rock garden: planting aubretia, roses, Canterbury bells and geraniums.
I’m not sure if this camouflage decoration put off the Boche from dropping bombs on us. During the raids we were hunched up with sopping feet in the Anderson, which every now and then shook and quaked in the depths from after-shock. I heard later that when I was three one huge bomb fell just hundreds of yards down our road at the junction of Essex Road with Crieg Road in front of the Leyton High School for Boys, gouging out a vast crater.
Grandpa and Grandma were mainly with us during the Blitz. Grandpa stood outside the shelter and stationed himself as if on guard. I can’t say what he thought he would be able to do if a bomb fell on us. I do remember later that if anyone farted in the shelter they were made to stand outside – expelled as a punishment. Perhaps this was what Grandpa kept doing!
Soon I would go away, too; that was inevitable. But to where, and with whom?
Dad was called up into the army and left us in 1941, but as he had bunions so badly (at one time he was in Croft’s Hospital with them, where they cared for him in the maternity ward!) he was never sent abroad to a war zone. As a humble private he served in the Royal Army Service Corps at postings in Scotland, Wales and the South.
When Hitler threatened to invade England Dad was stationed on Clapham Common, pasting up and setting out dummy tanks and guns of painted cardboard on the Common. They used lorries and dug tracks in the ground to make it all look real, so the Luftwaffe flying above would think we were heavily fortified.
Uncle Henry joined the Catering Corps. He was stationed at Reykjavik in Iceland. Later he was posted to a barracks in Buckinghamshire, so eventually – after the Blitz and not necessarily for my safety – Hilda took Raymond and me to stay with her not far from him in Little Brick Hill, a village outside Bletchley, near Cosgrave. We lived upstairs in the village pub. Mum stayed behind in Essex Road working, so she was very lonely and of all of us most exposed to danger. She’d come out to see us at Little Brick Hill whenever she could, and this was always a treat.
But my life with cousin Raymond was quite the opposite.
Raymond and I were billeted together in the pub, sharing a room. My cousin Raymond was six or seven years older than me and I spent a lot of my childhood years with him. Auntie Hilda treated me with kid gloves – she would love the Jesus out of me – while Raymond got the rough end of her tongue. It was he, not me, the golden boy, who always seemed to come in for it.
Not long before we were evacuated there was one hell of a ruction which I will never forget. I was round at Poplars Road and Auntie Hilda asked Raymond to take a jar of precious jam through to the front room and put it in the cabinet where she stored the best pieces. He picked up the jar and pranced up the passageway, puffed up with airs and graces as he went, possibly the more so as I was watching, but as he came through into the front room the lid spun off the jam, and the jam shot out of the jar all over and up the wall. Hilda was so furious that she completely lost her rag and knocked him to kingdom come.
‘Auntie, Auntie, stop it, stop it!’ I screamed, as I stood by terrified.
Now that we were living together in Little Brick Hill, Raymond at last had me in his power and at night under the bedclothes he had the chance to take his revenge. He would scare and terrorise me, tickling me, pummelling me, playing at ‘tortures’ under the sheets.
‘Why can’t he stop trying to frighten me all the time?’ I remember thinking. ‘I am so much younger than him, so why is he tormenting me so much?’
It was pretty obvious to someone a bit older. With hindsight I could quite understand him wanting revenge on me. I was treated as the special one, the one apart from the rest of the family, while Raymond was the ‘bloke’, the laddish one. Later I realised that I was always accepted as the one who didn’t quite fit in, who wasn’t going to take an ordinary route through life.
One day we went apple scrumping together in the orchard of a big house where a grand lady lived – a highly dangerous thing to do, for it was trespassing and illegal. I didn’t feel part of it, but I followed where Raymond led. The school I attended gave a picnic party for the local children, but they wouldn’t allow evacuated kids like Raymond and me to join in. Learning of this, Hilda went ballistic, stormed off to the headmistress, and made such a fuss that in the end, while we were still not included, we were taken back to the pub and had our own picnic. At that tender age I’d never heard language like Hilda’s – it was quite some gab she had the gift of!
All was clear from bombing raids when I returned home to Essex Road in late 1944. Like the thousands of young children sent out of London to avoid the Blitz and the destruction of much of the East End, I was restored to Mum – and Dad when on leave. We were
