Polly (5 page)

‘Come on!’ they shouted, ‘jump in, we will give you a lift, can’t have a good looker like you wandering the streets this time of the morning,’ and so on. Her mother looked terrified. She made an excuse about the pushchair but that was no problem and two soldiers jumped down and lifted pushchair, the girl and her unseen brother into the back of the lorry. There was nothing for it and the mother climbed on the back of the lorry and sat in the space the soldiers had made for her. She grasped the handle of the pushchair and looked at her
daughter with a combination of utter terror and direct threat to keep silent. Looking back, she realised that her mother must have been thinking about these soldiers and worrying about whether they knew her husband. Suppose they talked to him and told him the story? Really, it was totally stupid. When you think how many soldiers were fighting the war it was unbelievable that these men would somehow come across her husband, but she was young and naïve and thought that all the soldiers knew each other! She got more and more agitated with each minute that passed and looked as though she was going to cry.

They didn’t stay on the lorry for long. Her mother suddenly said this was where they were going and the soldiers helped them off again. They shot off in the opposite direction, round the first corner, and stopped. After a couple of minutes her mother looked back round the corner and, seeing nothing, they set off on their way again. Eventually they reached some gates, which she now realised belonged to the cemetery. They were closed, I suppose they weren’t unlocked until 8 o’clock or something. They stood in a doorway up the road until the gates were unlocked and when the keeper had walked away they went in. Her mother pushed her somewhere far from the gates to where there were some trees. She parked her daughter under the trees looking down one of the roadways and said she should watch to see if anybody came. Then her mother disappeared into the trees, urgently digging down into her shopping bag. After some while she came back, pulled out the blankets, took the bundle and disappeared again. After a bit longer she came back again, obviously crying, tucked her daughter into the pushchair and they retraced their steps back home, this time rather more slowly.

Her baby brother was never mentioned again. She had kept the secret until today, talking to a total stranger on top of a bus. She could only wonder at the terror of her poor young mother trying to work out what to do with this unwanted unwelcome baby and the desperation of that journey to the cemetery. But she could never stop wondering about that baby’s cry in the night.

I
do get fed up with all these scientists who find out that this or that food is bad for you. Every type of food seems to take turns at being bad for you – nowadays coffee is one of the big villains but when I was at school it was tea, and I once won a prize for an essay about the dangers and evils of tea drinking. The teacher gave us a lesson about it, full of warnings about the tannin and how it attacked the lining of your stomach, and goodness knows what else, and then everybody in the class had to write an essay for the competition. It was for all the schools in London. As far as I can remember it wasn't the first prize that I won, but it was something.

Mind you, tea in those days was always terribly stewed and I dread to think what was in it by the time you drank it. You see, tea was expensive so it never got wasted. Instead, when tea was made the teapot was put onto the hot plate and just kept going with more tea and water all day so that when anybody came in they were immediately offered a cup of tea. Old Mrs M used to go even further and every night she would pour the remains of that day's tea into a jug, which she kept on the dresser. Anybody who turned up was then offered a drink from the jug – cold stewed tea! It was absolutely foul.

These days you just don't appreciate just how tough times could be. When I was a little girl we used to live upstairs in the house and there was a couple living downstairs with two kids. One day the wife came up to ask if Mum would
like her to go and buy some cheese or something for her ‘for thre'pence'. So Mum prodded and probed and eventually discovered the reason. Apparently the husband had finally got a job, but would have to go out very early the next morning to start work. The wife wanted to buy some tea, milk and sugar so that she could send him to work with a cup of tea inside him, and she quite literally didn't have a penny in the house. He would do the whole day's work on that cup of tea. Mum gave the woman sixpence to buy some lunch as well. Mum was like that. I can remember times when she sent me round to Mrs Somebody-or-other with a bag of potatoes, carrots and a few onions and the firm instruction that ‘even if she offers, you must not take a penny for bringing it; not even a ha'penny!' She realised the woman was short and did something about it!

I will say this for Mum, whatever her many faults, she was generous and would not see anybody go hungry. And in those days people could go hungry and get into the most terrible state for the want of very little money. A couple of years after the war I was walking through Stratford and I met a girl I used to go to school with. After we had talked for a little while she said, ‘Do you realise your mum saved my life?' I didn't, so she told me the story. Soon after we had left school she had to get married and they had one kid, but her husband couldn't get work and they just got deeper and deeper into poverty. Eventually they were just completely out of money, out of things to pawn, out of things to sell, and had borrowed as much as they could stand from friends and relatives. She had just had enough of the struggle and decided that she couldn't go on. So she was walking through Stratford trying to work out how to kill herself when she met Mum. They started talking and slowly the story came out about how desperate the family was. As they parted Mum gave her half-a-crown and that bought food for another day. After that, the mood of desperation passed and gradually things began to look up. As far as she was concerned, even looking back twenty years or so, she insisted that on that one day Mum saved her life for half-a-crown.

People were simply poor, and poor in a way you just don't see these days – and nor would you want to see it again. We were alright because Dad always had a job and was able to walk straight back into it after the war. That was leaving aside that because of his job he got us all the vegetables and fruit we wanted either free or cheap.

You could see barefoot children in the streets. Fred told me once that when he was in the senior class at school his teacher used to buy biscuits out of his own pocket and gave Fred the job of finding out who hadn't eaten any
breakfast before coming to school and giving them a biscuit each. It could be awful, but you just had to get by.

Mary and Horatio Barker – the granpdarents – in about 1925.

The Bacon family used to live a few doors from us when I was a girl. It was a second marriage for the wife, which was pretty unusual in those days, and from the way she spoke and acted I think she must have come down a lot. She was a bit classy, if the truth be told. That aside, though, they were ever so happy but very poor and so were always looking for ways to make money. Apart from anything else Mrs Bacon had a baby every year so it was a big family to feed and clothe. Anyway, I remember the time when they made a rag rug. These rugs were made by knotting together strips of rag in a particular sort of way and were very popular, I suppose they were cheap and nobody could afford carpets. Anyway, the Bacons sat round as a family and made this quite large rug. Then Mr Bacon went round the street selling tickets to raffle it. It was pretty good, well made and with good colours, so Mum showed a
bit of interest. From then on she got the hard sell. He even cleared a space in front of the fire and showed her how good it looked. She agreed it looked good, but that was no help because she couldn't be sure of winning – at which Mr Bacon said he was sure she would win if she bought a ticket for five bob! Sure enough, she did win the rug, but she never took part in any more of the Bacons' money-making schemes because she didn't know who else had bought a ticket for five bob.

Life in the East End in the Depression wasn't easy, but we had our moments. I suppose in lots of ways we enjoyed even the simplest things more because they were so special and so unusual. The highlight of every year was Christmas and going to the Christmas pantomime. The rich people went on Boxing Day, because that was always a bit more expensive, but we used to go a day or so later. We always went to the Borough Theatre on the corner of Bridge Road – it was turned into a cinema later [Editor's note: the Rex]. The other theatres in Stratford were the Empire in the Broadway, but that was very posh and too expensive for us, and the Theatre Royal in Angel Lane [Editor's note: later the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, famous for Joan Littlewood's work], but that was too rough. The outing to the pantomime was a big event shared by all the neighbours. We always went to a matinee and us kids were sent up to the theatre to queue straight after breakfast. We would stay there all morning until lunchtime when the mums (and sometimes dads) would come up and bring sandwiches to eat. By the time we had eaten them the doors would open and in we would go. While the mums bought the tickets us kids had to run upstairs as fast as we could go to grab the right number of seats on the front row of the ‘gods'. We would watch the show from there.

Because he was in the market, Dad didn't work on Mondays and so when I left school and started work he used to make my lunch for me on Monday mornings. He didn't have much idea really so there was nothing delicate about his lunches, but they were ever so welcome. He would just cut a couple of slices of bread and stick a quarter-pound of cheese between them, adding a cucumber from the market and anything else that came to hand. When I got to work I used to take the lunch apart again and share it out between those who were short. Sometimes three or four girls would share that lunch, and Monday became a high point of the week. As soon as I arrived at work girls would ask what ‘dad' had given them for lunch today. It does doesn't bear thinking about, but that is how you live when things are really tight.

When Fred and I got married we took half a house, just up the road from Mum. In the downstairs half was a woman and her husband with five kids. Not
only that, she had a brother who was out of work. He lived in one room a little distance away but spent a lot of time with the family (when he wasn't looking for work, that is) and always had Sunday dinner with them. The woman used to go out late on Saturday, when the meat was cheap – well, the butchers didn't have refrigerators like today so what they didn't sell on Saturday would be spoiled by Monday. The woman, her husband and her brother would then have the meat, whatever was cheap, for their dinner and the kids would have rabbit stew. Rabbit was always cheap. That was the only meat they ate all week, just on Sunday.

I remember one Monday though, when the woman came upstairs with a face like thunder, and clutching a bit of meat from the dustbin. My mum never had much idea with leftovers and always used to throw out anything that hadn't been eaten. I never really thought about it and just carried on the same. I suppose I thought that everybody did the same. Anyway, the woman suddenly stuck this piece of meat up in front of my face and asked, ‘Did you throw this out?'

‘Yes,' I muttered, ‘we had too much.' I couldn't think what else to say.

‘You are a wicked, evil, girl,' she said, ‘Don't you realise there are kids in this house and you go throwing out perfectly good bits of meat.'

She really tore me off a strip and by the time she had finished with me I felt about half-an-inch tall. It had just never occurred to me to do anything else. Anyway, after that I always gave her any leftovers every Monday. In fact, I used to buy a little bit extra just to make sure of the leftovers. From then on, she and her husband used to save up thre'pence every week for half a pint of beer so that after the kids had gone to bed they would sit up and have meat sandwiches and beer. That was the highlight of the week for them.