Polly (10 page)

During one of the lay-off periods Fred and I got married and that was the end of work. For a start, the firm insisted that you left – somehow they were unhappy about married women, perhaps they were worried about competition from home. Then there was a sort of social argument – if you had a husband you had somebody to feed you and jobs should go to the poor devils who had to feed themselves. Nobody ever said this, but it was understood by everybody. Lastly, Fred was totally against the idea of me working; he really thought it was below his dignity for his wife to work. He never did like the idea of me working and was never a bit helpful. He wouldn't even get his own breakfast and if he was ever in from work before me wouldn't put things on to cook, even if I had prepared them all. Mind you, he was happy enough with the extras that the money eventually bought.

When any young woman left Clarnico to get married she always got a £5 gratuity from the firm. I had got married during a lay-off, but Daisy said that we should go down and try it on them anyway. I was ever so scared but she egged me on and down we went. We went to the personnel department and they gave me a form which I filled out and gave back to them. Then they said to wait, so I waited, and suddenly there was my £5. Now £5 was real money, I had never seen that much in my life. We bought our first radio with it. That was the first ‘extra' that we ever had and it made us ever so posh: I think we were the first people to have a radio in the whole street.

A little while later it was coming towards the Christmas rush time and Daisy said that she thought we ought to go down and see whether Clarnico would take us on even though we were not single. I didn't think it could possibly be worth the effort, because they just never took on married women. But Daisy kept on and on, so in the end we went down there and to my amazement they took us on. I suppose things were beginning to get a little bit better and they couldn't just pick up youngsters as and when they wanted them. From then on I stayed full-time right up to the war. Because of our experience we went straight into ‘Fancy Goods', packing all their special lines through the year. Really we had a wonderful time and did incredibly well out of it. We got staff discount on everything we bought and I had plenty of money in my pocket. I used to buy sweets for all the kids in the street sometimes, and always at Christmas. One Easter we did chocolate eggs with children's names written on
them, so I got them for a lot of the kids. They used to think I was marvellous and I was ever so popular – you can imagine. I got things for us as well. One year they did a Father Christmas figure whose top lifted off and inside was filled with ‘mystery gifts' attached to trailing ribbons, blue for men and pink for women. We kept that for years – in fact I think it survived the war – and used to get it out and repack it every Christmas.

I suppose Clarnico were, for their time, really good employers. Another of their schemes was a yearly bonus for workers. I can't remember what you had to do to qualify, but they used to make a great performance out of it. They used to hire the Peoples Palace up the Mile End Road for the occasion and we all had to troop up there to collect our money. The Clarnico band was there to play music all the way through the ceremony and all the managers would be sat up on the platform. Then we would line up and file past one at a time to be given our brown envelope with the bonus inside. One time I got a £5 note and it caused a real stir – nobody in our street had ever seen one before and nobody would change it for me. In the end my Mum went down to the corner shop and told them that if they didn't change it she would never shop there again. So they changed it – but they also ‘exhibited' it in the window for a couple of days! It's a wonder it didn't get pinched.

Even though he enjoyed the money, Fred hated the idea of me working but had to put up with it. Because of the extra money we were able to move to a flat in Manor Park. That was proper upmarket then – ‘frightfully, frightfully' high class. Fred really enjoyed that: as I said, he was a right social climber. Not that I should complain about him because he gave me a good life. He was a compulsive ‘joiner' but couldn't join anything without working away until he ran it, and I got all the benefit of the social life that went with it. He was a big wheel in the Swimming Club (local and county), the Freemasons, the Buffaloes and goodness knows what else in his time. Even when he retired and took a part-time kitchen job up in a London Gentlemen's Dining Club within six months he had his own set of keys, was in charge of the silverware, and was virtually assistant kitchen/cellar manager for their formal dinners.

Looking back to where he came from, from the very worst bit of Stratford which was itself a pretty rough part of the East End, he made a great deal of himself and in his quiet way was proud of it. He once said to me that there couldn't be many people from his background who had made a speech to a banquet in the Connaught Rooms, up in the City. And he was right. He was a climber, and was proud of himself, but he always said that his proudest moment was at some formal dinner or other, when he was being installed as President of whatever it was, and in his introduction the Chairman congratulated him
that his son had just got a place at Cambridge. He admitted to crying in public for about the only time in his life!

Anyway, back to Manor Park. We lived there for a couple of years but then my aunt announced she had found us a ‘nice house' in Keogh Road, back in Stratford. It must have been early 1940. My aunt was full of praises for this house though I think its main attraction was that it was next door to her. Uncle was ill and was getting progressively worse so that he had to go to hospital every couple of weeks. I think she just wanted somebody ‘family' next door to help look after him. One Saturday we arranged to go over to have a look at the house, though I didn't feel much like it. In fact I felt decidedly off colour and distinctly sick but I had promised Aunty that I would look. She was right, it was a nice little house and Keogh Road was much the better end of Stratford.

Being as I was nearby I decided that I might as well visit Mum while I was at it. By the time I got there I was feeling really ill. I knocked on her door and as soon as she opened it I didn't say a word but rushed straight past and into the loo to be sick. When I felt better I started telling her the story, about looking at the house but not feeling too good and so on and so on. She didn't say a word until she looked me in the eye and asked, ‘are you carrying then?' It just hadn't occurred to me up until then. We had been married for years, never taken any precautions but nothing had ever happened so I had just put such things out of my mind. Anyway, I was carrying so that was the end of my career in Clarnico and also made the decision to take the house.

I didn't go back to work until the early 1950s when both boys were at school and I got fed up with being at home all day. I saw an early morning office-cleaning job advertised in the local paper and to me it seemed ideal. It meant the boys would have to get themselves off to school in the morning, but I could be home by soon after nine so I was there pretty well all day in the holidays or if they were off school for any reason. I didn't say anything to Fred until after I got the job, because I knew he would object. He did object; in fact he never approved and never cooperated with anything to make my working life easier. Even so, the job suited me, suited the family and I enjoyed it, so I stayed there until we moved away from London in the mid-1960s.

A
s mentioned, Mum, Dad and us seven children lived upstairs in half a house in Lett Road. Downstairs lived the Ms, including their son Frank. Looking back, I think that he quite fancied me, but I was too innocent to notice. Mum noticed though, and was forever warning me about him, about being careful, about keeping away from him. I honestly didn't know what she was talking about – I must have been pretty naïve. Anyway, he was part of a group of friends that included Fred. Looking back on it they must have been a real bunch of tearaways but I never saw them in that sort of way at the time – I suppose youngsters never do. They used to go round to each other's houses so I saw quite a lot of them, including Fred.

One day they went swimming at the baths in Jupp Road. It would look pretty crude these days but then it was quite the place to go, with the height of modern amenities. It didn't have changing rooms as such, but instead had rows of cubicles around the edge of the pool. When a session ended the pool used to be emptied; nothing sophisticated, they just pulled a plug out of the bottom. For the boys this was a challenge, and they used to dive into the ever-decreasing water. To make it really hair-raising they would dive off the top of the cubicles. Well, this time they were doing the performance as usual but just as Fred dived somebody threw a pair of swimming trunks at him. They hit him in the face, and I suppose they blinded him for an instant.
Anyway, it completely messed up his judgement and he landed square on his head on the bottom of the pool.

He was in quite a state with blood everywhere, but he climbed out of the pool and looked at his head in the mirror. As he parted his hair to look at the wound he realised that he could actually see his skull, the skin had completely burst apart. You did not have to be a genius to know that he would have to go to hospital to get it stitched up. So he got changed and trooped off to the hospital with his mates – and remember that there were no ambulances in those days – so he walked from Jupp Road all the way to Queen Mary's in West Ham Lane, which must have been at least a mile or so. When he got there they stitched him up, but said that he should stay in overnight for observation. It was all a bit of an adventure so he stayed. Next morning the nurses were still not happy so they called for the doctor to look at him again. The doctor prescribed some medicine or other and they prepared to give it to him.

‘Open your mouth,' said the nurse.

‘It is open,' replied Fred.

‘Well open it wide,' she said.

‘It is open wide,' insisted Fred.

And that was the first they discovered that there was something drastically wrong between what he could feel and what he could control! The doctor came back again and this time, after very careful examination, discovered that he had completely split one of the vertebrae at the top of his spine from top to bottom. They didn't have all those collars and pulleys and things in those days so they laid him flat on his back and packed all round his head, neck and shoulders with sandbags to keep him totally still. And that was how he stayed for weeks.

Of course, when I heard the story from Frankie I was really horrified and felt terribly sorry for the poor bloke. So sorry, in fact, that I asked if I could go and visit him even though I barely knew him. Not possible, Frankie explained. Because he must not move at all he wasn't allowed any visitors.

‘Not even his mother?' I asked.

‘He hasn't got a mother,' Frankie replied, and then I heard the story of Fred's life. It was the sort of story you barely like to think about now but it was all too common in those days. His mother had been the dresser to Kate Carney, who was one of the big music hall stars up in London. His father was taken on as her coachman and I suppose the pair of them spent a lot of time waiting around at theatres and the like so they soon got together and got married. Soon after Fred was born his father died [Editor's note: according to the Birth Certificate
his father died before he was born] but his mother didn't stay single for long and she remarried. All Fred's brothers and sisters were by this second marriage and they all took their dad's name but Fred kept his. Then his mother died! Can you imagine how the poor kid must have felt. Still, all credit to Charlie Paternoster, he brought all those kids up as his own without any favouritism or difference between them. It must have been really hard though, and they suffered the sort of poverty that even I never knew. I can say that because they lived in the part of Stratford that even we looked down on, and never went to because it was so ‘bad'. I suppose it was the circumstances but your dad was always a bit apart from the rest of the family and used to do his own thing a lot of the time. Fair's fair, though, he always looked after the old man as if he was his own father and in his old age used to visit every week and keep him in tobacco. When the old boy died his real children insisted that Fred was ‘the eldest son' and should lead the mourners. I think Fred was quite taken aback, but he very much appreciated the gesture. Anyway I, of course, only heard the story as far as his mother dying but that was enough to make me sorry beyond words for the poor fellow and decided I would have to get to know him when he came out of hospital.

Eventually he did come out of hospital. Then the boys were all into motorbikes, which was something else my mother warned me about. The very next day after he came out of hospital he went down to Eastbourne on somebody's pillion. You would have thought he would have been more careful. Talking of which, one of the boys was my friend Lucy's brother and he got engaged to a girl named Chrissie from the other side of Stratford. He was killed in a motorbike accident but Lucy, Chrissie and I remained friends ever since [Editor's note: in fact until they died], though Chrissie never took up with anybody else and stayed single. I think that Fred got well known in the hospital and he certainly appreciated all they did for him because he went onto their blood-donors panel. Those were the early days of blood transfusion when you laid side-by-side with the person you were donating to, and got a certificate to tell you the outcome. I've still got one of them somewhere. Anyway, I made the effort to meet Fred, talk to him, and eventually we got together. That quite upset my mother, especially because of his accident. She firmly believed it must have caused some weakness and always maintained ‘that he wouldn't make old bones' so you can guess how she reacted when I told her we were going to get married!