‘Can I have a fried-egg sandwich?’ Joan had asked her mum one day when she came back from a visit to Peggy’s.
‘A fried-egg sandwich?’ her mother asked her, incredulously. ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’
‘Well, you fry an egg, put it on some bread, add a bit of brown sauce, put another piece of bread on top and then chop it in half,’ Joan replied, innocently.
‘And where did you hear about this?’ Mrs Cook enquired.
‘Down Peggy’s,’ came the expected response.
No more was said on the matter, but from then on Joan made sure to get her egg sandwiches at her friend’s house rather than asking her mum to provide them.
Fortunately for Joan’s mother, in joining the Cook clan she had married into money, which made keeping her own house as nice and proper as she liked that bit easier. Whether it came from cash-rich Nanny Cook or from his own hard work, her husband was somehow able to make sure that the family never wanted for anything. They were the most well-off people in their neighbourhood by a long shot, and the tally man didn’t even bother knocking on their door since they could afford whatever they wanted without hire purchase. Mrs Cook had fur collars on her coats and they always had the latest modcons, paid for up-front in cash. Mr Cook was the proud owner of a motorbike, and his children bundled into the little sidecar for regular days out. Later, he even splashed out on an old black Ford 10. When domestic fridges came on the market, the Cooks were the first in the area to buy one, and Joan did good business selling ice cubes to kids in the street.
Most extravagant of all was the family’s holiday home, a caravan near Burnham-on-Crouch, complete with a fully fitted miniature kitchen and net curtains on all the windows. Joan lost count of the number of weekends and summer holidays she spent cooped up there with her parents and little brother, with no one her own age to have fun with. To her mother’s dismay, she dreamed of joining the other boys and girls from Otley Road, who went hop-picking for six weeks of the year and returned with romantic-sounding stories of sing-songs around open fires and gazing up at the stars.
After much badgering, Mrs Cook decided that the best way to knock this notion on the head was to go along with it, and agreed to let her daughter head off with the neighbours instead of accompanying the rest of the family to the caravan.
Once there, Joan realised she had made a terrible mistake. Spending all day stripping the bines was exhausting, and she hated the bitter taste of the hops, not to mention the mud and dirt – and sleeping every night in a tin hut. When her mother came to visit her, she cried and begged to come home.
‘All right, love,’ Mrs Cook laughed, affectionately. ‘Perhaps now you’ll realise how lucky you are.’
The Cooks fancied themselves a cut above the rest in other ways, too. Joan’s parents didn’t drink – unlike their neighbours, the aptly named Dances, who would stagger down the road every weekend singing on their way back from the pub. They had never smoked, not even when Mrs Cook was working at a cigarette factory. They wouldn’t dream of swearing, either out in public or within their own walls.
In June 1953, when the coronation of the new Queen Elizabeth turned the East End into one big street party, the Cooks declined to RSVP. Otley Road had been chosen as one of 70 ‘roads of revelry’ hosting festivities in West Ham, and the 60 local kids were joined by a contingent from a nearby children’s home for a fancy-dress parade, while neighbours vied with each other to put up the most bunting and flags. Mr and Mrs Cook, however, did not decorate their house, nor did they take their places at the long row of tables lining the centre of the road, where the inhabitants of every other house were eagerly eating, drinking, laughing and singing. Instead, they watched discreetly from their doorway.
Although they projected a picture of respectability, the Cook family hid an ugly secret, one that sadly was all too common at the time. The outwardly affable Mr Cook had a temper that often bubbled over into violence, and while the kids were fortunate enough to be spared his blows poor Mrs Cook bore them frequently.
Each evening, mother and children would quake with fear when Dad came home from work, waiting to find out what mood he was in. Joan and her brother John would do their best to protect their mum, jumping on top of her and trying to shield every inch of her body from his blows. But sometimes Mr Cook was too quick for them. Watching the beatings night after night, Joan grew determined that no one would ever make a victim out of her.
The source of Mr Cook’s anger was hard to fathom, but his own life had not been an easy one. Perhaps feeling displaced in his mother’s affections by the fairground children had left him with a burning resentment. Perhaps the trauma of more recent experiences had poisoned his personality. A crane driver in the docks, he had accidentally killed a man by dropping a load of coal on top of him. On a single day he had been forced to attend two inquests at the same coroner’s court – one for the victim and another for his own father, who had died in his sleep just a few days before.
Whatever the reason, Mr Cook also struggled to express affection for his children, and Joan could not remember a time in all her life when he had so much as put his arm around her. He was, however, very attached to his whippets, which he had blessed with human names: Peter and Poppy.
By the time Joan left school at the age of 15 – the leaving age having now been raised by a year – her mother had already made up her mind what to do with her. Although no one would have known it, Mrs Cook had spent her own early life working at various factories, including Tate & Lyle’s Thames Refinery, and she was determined that her children would not follow in her footsteps. ‘My daughter is no factory fodder,’ she would say. ‘I’m getting her a job in an office.’
This was easier said than done, since Joan’s academic record was less than stellar. She had been placed solidly at the bottom of almost every class at school, where the only talent anyone had discerned in her was a remarkable capacity for rhyming. From a young age, Joan had talked to her friends in rhyme, firing back rapid, perfectly sensible responses to whatever they said, and turning every exchange into a couplet.
The nuns who taught her at school found it rather exasperating. ‘Write the answer on the board,’ they would tell her, only to hear in reply, ‘Yes, Miss, let us praise the Lord’ – which they couldn’t really argue with. It was an unusual ability, to be sure, but it didn’t really lend itself to gainful employment.
Joan did have one skill useful for office work – like her mother, she was an excellent mimic. When Mrs Cook secured her an interview for an office job at CWS Flour Mills in Silvertown, she reminded Joan to follow her example. ‘Talk proper,’ she told her. ‘None of your ain’ts and fings!’
Putting on her plummiest accent, Joan sailed through the interview and soon found herself operating their switchboard. ‘Good afternoon, may I transfer you?’ she would ask demurely, before pushing the little wooden sliders up and down to connect the calls to the relevant offices. It was fun to begin with, but after many months in the job, with only a few old fogies for company, Joan was desperate for something more exciting.
Her friend Peggy, whose parents could ill afford Joan’s mother’s prejudices about factory labour, had taken a job among the sugar-packing machines on the Hesser Floor at Tate & Lyle, and the more Joan heard from her friend about the life there, the more she felt convinced it was for her. ‘So you go out every weekend,’ she quizzed her, ‘and the company has its own parties?’
‘Yeah,’ Peggy replied proudly. ‘And the pay’s brilliant, what with the bonuses and all.’
In the end, Joan chucked in the job at the flour mill without asking her parents’ permission. ‘Oh, Joan, what have you done?’ her mother wailed when she heard the news. But it was too late. Her daughter had already gone to the Personnel Office at Plaistow