There were a lot of us, but my mother adopted a boy; her friend who had a child died in the workhouse, and my mother took the baby and brought him up. He lived with us, but my eldest sister, Violet didn’t get on with him. In Edith Road—and it was usually the same in the other places we lived (because several times we had to leave after falling into arrears with the rent)—we had three rooms: a kitchen/living room with the grate and sink where the lot of us had our meals, washed and sat about, and two bedrooms. A gas meter was laid on, but such a thing as a bathroom was unheard of. Most of our neighbours lived in the same way.
I have a picture of women, wearing their husbands’ caps, talking across the road from their front doors, some of them leaning on their brooms, others scrubbing their front steps with buckets of water. The houses just could not be kept clean, because the children were always rushing in and out, and there were no street cleaners in those days—at least not in our area. The dust and dirt from the streets outside and smoke from the railway and the factories blew in so much that in summer our windows were often kept tightly closed. In winter there was the damp, against which one could do nothing. Whenever possible, us kids were sent into the street so that we swarmed around the pavements.
To us the pawnshop was important—on the Saturday our best clothes were taken out to wear on Sunday, then they were back in again on Monday. My mother even used to pawn her wedding ring and her Sunday clothes; thankfully those days have gone now, but we were always in the pawnshop. I hated it. To make a few pennies we sold bunches of mint in West Green Road by the kerb, at a penny a bunch. We had a garden and my father used to grow mint and carrots. When the carrots got so high, my brother and I would dig them up, take the tops off and wash them in the butt outside, and stick the stalks back again in the soil—and take the carrots to school. One day I got caught going underneath my desk to eat a piece of carrot. The teacher caught me and said, ‘Bring out what you’re eating.’ I emptied all these carrots onto the floor. She said, ‘I never knew we had a donkey in the class.’
Dad went into the army in 1914. I remember my mother hanging out the washing in the garden at the time, when my pa came to go, and I don’t know what he said, but I saw her wiping her eyes with her apron. From then on my mother had to carry the whole burden, so, soon after he was gone, she went to work in a munitions factory. In a brown overall and with a mob cap covering her jet-black hair, she’d go off early in the morning, coming home dead tired in the evening. It was a trying time for her because, before setting off for work, she had to get the five of us ready for school before the first factory whistle. Bill, the eldest, was in the top form, while I, at five or so, was sent along with the others, and a neighbour looked after Rosie, the baby. War at first seemed quite exciting to us children in Tottenham, with talk of heroes and our British navy, and the enemy Hun, but soon there were food cards and, before going to school, we had to queue up outside food shops, which I hated. There were free meals at school—usually pea soup or stew dumpling—but it wasn’t sufficient, and by evening we were hungry. Often my mother hadn’t enough food for us, and I can remember many nights when my brother and I stood outside the factories, especially the Harris Lebus furniture factory in Ferry Lane, waiting for the people to come out from various shifts, holding out our hands for any bits of their lunch they had left over. Often we were in luck, getting half a sandwich or a piece of bread and cheese.
I had to go into hospital, because I had a fall. It was a severe winter—one of the worst winters we’d ever known—and my mother was working in Leavis’s factory. For this she needed hairpins, as she had long hair. It was early in the morning, she was going to work and the factory hooter was going—and she hadn’t any hairpins—so she got my young brother and said, ‘You go and get me some hairpins. And mind how you go—it’s very slippery.’
He got as far as the iron gate and he fell and came back. So she got me and said, ‘You go now and see if you can keep your feet properly.’ So I went. I didn’t slip, but I knocked my elbow very badly. But I carried on, got her hairpins and came back, but the elbow was very bad. My mother went off to work, but when I was at school there was the teacher doing the PE exercises, and she pulled my arm up and I winced. She said, ‘What are you wincing for? What’s the matter with you?’
And I said, ‘I banged it on my way out.’
She looked at it and said, ‘I’d better write a letter to your mother to take you to the doctor.’
My mother took me to the Tottenham hospital, and they kept me in and operated on me. They discovered a diseased bone, which was operated on twice, and I was in hospital for quite a long time with osteomyelitis. I’ve still got the scars.
When I came out, my father, who had been ill with pneumonia, was invalided home from France and sent to a Redhill convalescent home. He was a very good cook in the army and they allowed me to go and help him during the daytime. He had a landlady who looked after him and me of a night and I had a wonderful time there in Redhill. We used to go blackberrying with his chums and the landlady. When I came home, the nurse used to come and dress my wound. My father stayed there, cooking for the Redhill barracks, until he was invalided out of the army, and my time there was an interval of freedom I never forgot.
It was during a Zeppelin air raid that my brother Georgie was born. There were now two babies instead of one. For some reason, my older brother and sister were always scrapping with each other, and, besides, Jim was a boy, so that I had most of the responsibility for looking after my young sister, Rosie, and Georgie, the baby. Oh Lord, what a burden it was! What I remember now of the war years is not the excitement, and not even standing in the food queues, but always being saddled with these two unfortunate kids wherever I went. Soon after Georgie was born, I began missing days at school. I now slept with two others in one small bed and got so little sleep that I often dropped off during class. In this way I was soon the dunce at school and, because I lost my temper when the teachers spoke sharply to me, I became sullen and obstinate—even though I didn’t want to be.
On 14 July 1919 an election was held in our district, and voting cars with huge posters were touring the streets, telling people like my parents—who knew nothing of politics or social conditions—who they were to vote for. We children were playing out in the streets and somebody dared me to jump on the back of one of the voting cars, which was moving pretty fast. Because I was always game for a dare, I did, and hung on and turned my head back triumphantly. But, just as I did so, I looked straight at an enormous policeman standing on the kerb not six feet away, who gave me such a glare that in my terror I let go, falling flat on the paving stones and grazing my arms and knees so badly that once again I was taken off to hospital to have my cuts and grazes dressed. This took time, and when I came home late, creeping quietly through the door for fear of the hiding I thought was in store for me, I had a new surprise. My mother’s room was locked again, the house was full of neighbours and I was told I had just been presented with twin brothers! My mother had been told I’d been run over, and the shock had precipitated the birth. I don’t know why I hadn’t realised she was pregnant—somehow lots of children never did. But when I heard the news—not only one new baby but two—everything seemed to go black before my eyes, and in my mind, too. Now I would never be free. It would always be like this. I just went out and sat on the doorstep, though my cuts and bruises were still sore, and I wept and wept. Now, instead of having two youngsters to look after, I had four.