Edith Turner
When my brother was three days old, my mother had milk fever. That's when a baby can't suck the milk from the mother and the milk goes to the brain where it causes something like meningitis. It came from worry, anxiety and unemployment. My mother was unstable. She didn't know what she was doing. She smacked my brother's bottom till it was blue, and he kept crying. The more he cried, the more she smacked him, and she couldn't feed him because we hadn't any milk. My father went to the Board of Guardians in Dalston. They sent a doctor to the house and the doctor made an order that my mother should be taken to Homerton Infirmary. So my mother was taken away with my brother strapped to her side on a stretcher. At the same time, a nurse carried my youngest sister downstairs because she was found to have double pneumonia. That left the rest of us with my father.
Jack Banfield
In my family, there were seven children as well as Mum and Dad. Two of the children died as babies. That was very common. When you got over the age of about ten, you were past the post. Until then, there was measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, scarlet fever, so many diseases.
Florence Hannah Warn
When a tiny child died, the cost of a funeral was beyond the pocket of a poor family, so an arrangement was made to bury the infant at the same time as an adult's funeral. In front of the glass hearse there was a little glass compartment running the width of the hearse, and the little coffin was placed there, and so buried in the adult's grave. We had a little brother, Gilbert, who died of pneumonia, and this was the form his burial took. None of us attended the funeral, but I remember we had black sashes to wear on our Sunday dresses.
Don Murray
When I was at school, every class had at least two or three children who were knock-kneed, bow-legged or hump-backed. There was something wrong with at least three or four in each class.
John Wainwright
I had a little sister who died when she was eight. She was out one day, watching my elder brother play football at the local ground. She got a terrible drenching and she finished up with pneumonia. She died soon afterwards.
Edith Turner
I was undernourished and I developed ringworm and eczema. All of my head was covered with sores. I was taken to Homerton Infirmary where all my hair was cut off and my head was covered with a cap and bandages to cover the sores. I was in a proper ward but I was shut away because I was contagious. The treatment was free and supported by voluntary contributions. When I was better and able to come home, my parents were unable to take me. So I was put into the Cottage Homes, which was a place similar to Doctor Barnardo's, where children that they thought were unwanted were cared for until the parents could take them again. There was a matron but I didn't learn any school there. It was more like jobs around the house.
Rosamund Massy
I shall always remember staying in a Salvation Army hostel in a shipping town in the North. Inside that house, run by a remarkable woman, there were many little girls living there for safety, having all been criminally assaulted. These poor little children were between eight and ten years of age and their little old faces were heartbreaking. One of them told us that she had never had a toy in her life.
Florrie Passman
I was involved with a day nursery, and I used to visit the mothers who had young babies, in their homes. They used to take them to the nursery at about two weeks old, until they were four or five. The little girls were dressed in pink, and the little boys in blue, and when they went home, the clothes they'd worn in the daytime were put into tubs and washed, and they went home in their own things, which had been fumigated. This was because in the rooms of the places they came from there were bugs on the walls. They were difficult to get rid of because there were so many children living together.
I can remember a Rabbi telling me, ‘Do you know, when I first came to England, I fell on my knees and I was kissing the earth. In Russia I was frightened to walk through a street in case I was going to be arrested – for doing nothing. But here you can walk about – you can laugh and talk – and no one's going to touch you here. What better place can you be in than in England?’
Mrs Landsman
I was in Petticoat Lane and I can remember seeing a child of about eight with no shoes and no stockings on, with his foot cut. A policeman picked the kid up and put him on his shoulder, and was carrying him to a hospital with blood pouring from his leg.
E. J. Dutch
I had appendicitis before the First World War. It used to be called congestion of the bowels, but then the King had it and they started calling it appendicitis.
Steve Tremeere
Mother had what they called a breakdown. She was taken queer and they took her straight over to the asylum, and she was there till she died at the age of fifty-four. Well, Father had been just an ordinary fisherman. He'd been brought up in the workhouse and he'd come out at thirteen and was apprentice to a trawlerman at Yarmouth. Well, he had to leave the sea and he went as a labourer. I was eighteen months old. There was my sister four years older than me and my brother Reggie in between. Aunt Maria, she wanted to take the girl, and Annie wanted to take Reggie, but Father said no. ‘I'll bring them up all on my own,’ he said.
Any rate, I went to school when I was three and a half. We wore petticoats then and we were left in another room, and we all played together. It wasn't supervised by a teacher. Sometimes older girls looked after you. Sometimes my sister came down there for an hour and looked after us.
I went to St Mary's School when I was six. Our teacher was an old spinster – a proper martinet, but she had a heart of gold. In her desk there was always an apple or orange or something which she cut up in little bits for us. Then we went up to the big school at eleven. You had exams then, and you had to get so many before you could go up into the next class. If you didn't get that, you stopped down there. I know some boys that stopped in number one till they left school at fourteen. We had one teacher who could take everything – every subject the whole of the year. Within a fortnight he knew every boy, and within one month he had you all weighed up. Them what could get on with their work used to go up the back of the class. All what were backward he had down in front of him. Always forty, forty-five boys in one class.
We were harum-scarums. It didn't matter about clothes – there was no school uniform then. As long as your hands and face were clean, that was it. You could go to school and you'd see some boys with a pair of trousers on and you wouldn't know what was the original cloth, it was patched so much. The only thing he looked at was your face and your neck and your hands. If he caught you, you went out to the wash-house. It was cold water – and you washed yourself, too. If you didn't wash he'd send a couple of older boys to wash you.
Elsie Beckwith
I remember holding my parents' hands as we walked into the hall, and we got seats downstairs. There was a sort of platform, and this boy was there. I thought his father was there – there was someone with him anyhow – but I was just a kid and I wasn't interested much. This boy said he was going to speak about salvation, and he took as his text ‘How can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?’ I was only a kid, I was just listening, but I remember the text because my father wrote it down, he was an awful fellow for writing things down, he used to read them over and over again. I used to get it off, and mother said, ‘Oh yes, that was the boy preacher.