Mr Lowe spoke several foreign languages, including ‘Czechoslovakian’ and Hungarian, all of which strangely failed him when it came to swearing at his clients. Despite the fact they were often his fellow central Europeans, he did this very loudly in English. One of his better customers sold holidays under the name and advertising banner of ‘See Spain’, an exotic destination unknown to anyone in the area. Few who sought his services to print their brochures and baggage labels paid unless he went physically to shake the money out of them. He had to go through this process on most Fridays to get enough money in the bank to pay the staff’s wages.
He also swore at his staff but my mum and two or three other women who worked there – none of whom would have classified themselves as liberal on the subject of industrially colourful language – seemed only mildly offended. Should he cast doubt on their parentage or liken them to parts of the anatomy rarely mentioned at the time, he could be a ‘horrible man’. But to a degree he was excused the scorn which would be poured on locals who acted like this (the Saturday-night Brays, for example). It was assumed he could not have grasped the seriousness of what he was saying. It was the same if the people working for him were in his factory-come-house toilet at a time he wanted to use it. Mr Lowe would not retreat tactfully, as if relieving himself was the last thing on his mind, but wait outside and rattle on the door handle, shouting ‘How lonk vill you be in dere?’ He did not quite understand how we did things, which was to say, how they should be properly done.
This was entirely to the advantage of local kids when it came to playing up against his wall. He raised no objection. By contrast, the wall on the opposite corner we usually avoided. It belonged to a small engineering factory, populated by men in blue overalls who wore collars and ties beneath them as a symbol of the nation’s industrial standing. The foreman, in his white overall, was vigilant about the noise of ball on brickwork and would come out to complain that his workers’ concentration on their clanking machinery was being impaired. One day he caught me down the factory’s basement area after I’d climbed the railings to retrieve a ball. He threatened to call the police. I had no doubt he would or, for such a crime, that Scotland Yard would turn up in force.
We lived with my grandparents. My grandad was from the Exmouth Market, near Saffron Hill and the Italian area, where his mother had leased a shop and sold roast meals. The vicar at the Holy Redeemer church opposite – High Anglican, with nuns, mass and sense of mission among the toiling poor – challenged her on why she opened on Sundays. ‘Because it’s my best day, vicar,’ she said, ‘like yours’, which chased him off She had the same effect on my great-grandfather when he drank or gambled, and he’d flee for weeks at a time to a sister in Bedfordshire.
My nan was born just off Theobald’s Road in Holborn, a street or so back from the house where Disraeli lived. She spent much of her early life living in the City and Finsbury, near Smithfield Market and the Barbican, then later further north off the Goswell Road. Her grandmother was Italian, from a family she said sold ice cream – what they didn’t sell in the day was kept under the bed at night. My nan’s family was poor, not least because her father, a music printer, went blind when she was little, working by candlelight in the basement of the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand. When my grandparents married they moved across the Finsbury border into Islington, an advance of about a mile from their backgrounds.
My grandad earned most of his living in the years between the wars as a freelance bill poster, the mythical ‘Bill Stickers’. He worked alone, cycling miles with pastebrush, bucket and bills to beyond Hammersmith in one direction and the Burdett and East India Dock Roads in the other. A policeman once commandeered a milkman’s horse and cart to chase and arrest him in the Fulham Palace Road. The crowd outside a labour exchange shouted and converged on the policeman, who had to let him go. As big a threat was a rival cousin, whose gang would rip his work down. On one occasion they cornered him in a Finsbury mews and beat him up. Much of his bill posting work was for the Sporting Life. He also delivered papers and worked in Bouverie Street at the News of the World on Saturday nights, when the pay around Fleet Street’s machine rooms was particularly good.
In the absence of pension plans, each time he saved up enough he would buy a house as a hedge against old age. The average Islington price in the 1920s and ’30s was £200–350. He had three in our street, all on our side. Each was £50 dearer than houses bordering the Regent’s Canal opposite because of the problem they had with rats clambering up from the towpath. He had four others in Carnegie Street, one road over from where the canal came out after its mile-long journey through the tunnel that ran from Colebrooke Row to Bamsbury. My grandma’s oldest sister, Ada, who had played at the Collins music hall on Islington Green with Chaplin before he went to America (‘not a nice man’; he never spoke to her or the others in the chorus line), had lived in one of them. So had her son Teddy, who was a little older than my mum and a favourite cousin. All my grandad’s Carnegie Street houses, however, were destroyed one night in the bombing.
The London Blitz had started on a warm Saturday afternoon early in September 1940 when my mum and her sister were visiting Aunt Ada and cousin Teddy. He had a good job as a shop-fitter, which exempted him from military call-up since his skills were put to making rear-gunner placements on bombers. When the sirens sounded they didn’t want to be caught away from home, so Teddy walked them down through Chapel Market and along the small street round the back of the Agricultural Hall – a large building where farmers used to exhibit their prize animals and which had the look of King’s Cross railway station about it. At Upper Street by the Angel high pavement they stopped to watch the early moments of the raid. Planes were fighting to the south, away above the area of Moorgate and east over the docks. At the time it was a bit of a show. But the German planes were dropping incendiaries and, when it got darker, the sky over the City and river was alight. Then the real bombers came back.
In one of his broadcasts, Churchill – or the man who did his voice when he was away in the USA visiting Roosevelt-announced this as everyone’s ‘finest hour’. The family spent the initial month of raids in the basement, upright piano against the window. Stuck amid the machinery of the News of the World print room on the first night, my grandad wouldn’t believe how bad it was until he’d experienced it himself on the second.
From shortly after the first siren at about seven in the evening, to not much before 7 a.m. when the all-clear sounded, the house shook. Bombs landing nearby were both terrifying and of some comfort. Once one had exploded close at hand, the next in the string dropped by that plane would, reliably, be away and beyond. Much worse was the device at some point in the middle distance. The bomb straight after it could be the one to fall on you. The British guns continually fired back. (My mum said the sound was like that, two years later, of the Allied guns opening up at Alamein.) Maybe briefly you’d doze off. When you found yourself still alive after the planes had gone, it was impossible to imagine that, on looking outside, you’d find anyone or anything else had survived.
In the mornings my mother, who was seventeen, and her sister, my aunt Olive, who was younger by a year, walked to work down the City Road, picking their way through a chaos of rubble and firemen’s hoses. The City Road maternity hospital was among the bombed buildings one morning, its beds blown halfway out the windows. The teenagers worked at Waterlow’s in Old Street, which printed foreign banknotes. After a day spent staring at the face of Chiang Kai-shek, they walked home, had their tea, put on a pair of slacks and prepared for another night.
My grandad spent weeks looking for a location to get them out to, then was reminded of his distant aunt whom his father used to run away to from Exmouth Market. The family, including my mum’s one-year-old brother Keith, and other members like Great-aunt Ada, moved to about 50 miles away in Sandy, in Bedfordshire, where they found a place over a shop in the High Street.
Grandad stayed behind. Not wishing