When I started to make friends with other children at school it began to dawn on me not only that our domestic circumstances left something to be desired, but also that my family was, to say the least, a bit strange by other people’s standards. Some of my classmates’ parents had fared better than mine on the housing list and had already been moved into the new council tower blocks near Victoria Park. Their flats were luxuriously airy and light, yet warm in the winter—the kind of homes you might see on television adverts for gravy, where happy families sat smiling around the table as Mum, sporting a frilly pinny, served a slap-up meal in her spanking new Formica kitchen. Other friends lived in post-war prefabs, ramshackle but still standing, with wonderfully overgrown gardens.
What they all had that we didn’t was space. They also had brothers and sisters, and the moment I was over their doorsteps my nostrils would be assailed not by something akin to the floral scents that permeated Aunt Carrie’s ‘front rooms’ but by an unfamiliar cocktail of stale milk, sweet vomit and the unsettling aroma of cloth nappies boiling in a saucepan. ‘Hold my sister for me,’ somebody would say, casually handing over a small alien creature. These girls were already trainee mums, tending confidently to their younger siblings, but I was terrified by the tiny, bawling infants that wriggled furiously in my awkward embrace, their faces scrunched into tight, red balls of discomfort.
Everyone else’s parents appeared to have at least two children, and whether the adults had themselves grown up in happy or dysfunctional families, or in severe hardship like my mother, they all seemed to aspire to raising several kids, either to recreate a rosy childhood or to compensate for a rotten one. For a little girl whose ménage consisted of parents, assorted pets and the two oddballs who lived downstairs, it was something of an eye-opener.
Our extended family, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, was scattered, and with no phone and no car, it wasn’t easy to stay in touch on a regular basis. Occasionally we would visit my father’s sister, Aunt Joan, in Chigwell, but there were no big get-togethers with uncles, aunts and cousins all present. My dad’s brother Lenny had died in the Second World War and his youngest sibling, Johnny, was nearly twenty years his junior. They seemed to have lost track of one another after my father’s fall-out with his mum. As it was impossible for my parents to entertain relatives or friends in our cramped quarters at Lefevre Road, either we had to visit them or everyone went to the pub.
The exception was my mother’s adored brother, another Johnny, a stevedore at the docks in Wapping. We often spent weekends with him and his wife Kath at their tenement flat at Riverside Mansions. While they drank with my parents in a pub by the Thames called the Jolly Sailor, I played outside with my five cousins, pacified with pennies and pop. We never crossed the threshold of the saloon bar, but from the street we would hear the drunken chatter subside from time to time when the jukebox played a sentimental tune or someone began to sing a heartbreaking Irish song about love and separation. ‘I’m a Rover’ was a favourite, and we kids would join in outside.
…Though the night be dark as dungeonNot a star to be seen aboveI will be guided without stumbleInto the arms of my only love.
My father must have felt like an outsider among all the Catholic dock workers in the Jolly Sailor, and perhaps excluded by my mum’s close relationship with her brother, too, but if he did, he kept it to himself.
After a raucous Saturday night, there would sometimes be a church procession on Sunday. My younger cousin Catherine, dressed in lace like a baby doll, glided past Riverside Mansions one morning as though she had been set on a white raft sailing through the narrow docklands streets. I would be sent off to Mass with my cousins to stand mouthing an unfamiliar catechism while the priest came along flicking incense on us. Then, as if on cue, I would faint, sliding to the ground and regaining consciousness just in time to hear my cousins yet again blaming my father’s religion. ‘You’re a Proddy dog. The incense found you out!’ I don’t think I’m the first person to suffer from fainting fits in church. It was probably due to low blood sugar or kneeling and standing up again too quickly, but there again, maybe my cousins were right.
One year we spent Christmas with Uncle Johnny and Aunt Kath—a real treat as Christmas at Lefevre Road was often fraught. There wasn’t room for a proper tree so my mother would stand a small artificial one with silvery tinsel branches on the sideboard and painstakingly decorate it with lights and baubles. We had very few 13 amp sockets so the fairylights had to be plugged into the main light socket in the ceiling (all sorts of things had to be plugged into those sockets, including an electric blanket I had on my bed during the winter). My dad would come in from work and throw open the door. Being so tall, he would catch the wire and the whole lot would come crashing down. I have a memory of my mother once stamping on all the fallen baubles in frustration, crying, ‘That’s it! I give up!’
The flat at Riverside Mansions wasn’t exactly palatial but there was a real sense of a family Christmas there, with presents hidden in every room to be hunted for in a clamour early in the morning. In material terms my cousins were poorer than I was, but they had something I didn’t: each other. I shared a bed with my cousins Pat and Catherine. On the night before Christmas, as I lay there between them, still wide awake, Pat, sensing that I was fretful, took me in her arms and cuddled me. For the first time I was acutely aware that, as an only child, I was missing out on a sense being part of a loving clan of children. My cousins might have scrapped like cats and dogs but they would support each other through good times and bad.
There were other cousins I got to see less frequently because their parents had settled in Essex, part of the diaspora from the East End tempted either by the promise of work at the Ford car factory or by the offer of a brand-new council house. My father was always disparaging about Essex. The new housing estates there were, he said, ‘ersatz’ and he dismissed Dagenham as ‘Corned Beef City’. Looking back, these estates were rather sterile and soulless. The residents became overly houseproud and couldn’t help being sucked into a culture of keeping up with the Joneses. Front lawns were fastidiously manicured, cars washed even when they were already clean and curtains twitched in streets where very little happened. To an East End kid, a Sunday afternoon in Essex was depressingly quiet. In Becontree or Chigwell even the lone bell of an ice-cream van, isolated as it was from the accompanying sights and sounds of Sunday activities at home—the bustle of Brick Lane market, drunks singing in the pubs, radio broadcasts wafting from open windows—struck a mournful note. In spite of our less than ideal living conditions, my parents much preferred the rough and tumble of East London and would never have entertained the notion of moving away. For all its shortcomings, it was home.
My dad cycled to work every morning and, as a small child, I was sometimes allowed to go with him, propped on the crossbar of his bike. He would weave his way through the City traffic and, as we approached Tower Hill, the Mint would suddenly appear, more imposing even than Buckingham Palace. On entering the building we followed long corridors whose high ceilings were studded with chandeliers, my father pausing to speak to important-looking men in rooms where plush, draped curtains swirled on polished floors. I wandered around, looking up at fine old paintings on the walls as they talked of ‘bonuses’, ‘incentives’ and ‘demarcation’. Then I would descend with my father to the furnace room, where ‘his men’ were waiting for him. After the graciously appointed upper offices, it was a vision of hell.
As soon as the door to this inferno opened I was hit by a blast of searing heat. At first, dazzled by the light, I could make out no more than the black silhouettes of men heaving long-handled pans of molten metal.