Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood by Jacky Hyams Page A

apparently. There’s a story that he had another woman set up in a flat in the West End. I dunno. I don’t believe all that stuff about him doing it. She died, that’s all. They all sit around in the George & Dragon and make things up, if you ask me.’
    Yet I never quite forgot that afternoon tea in the big house in Surrey – and the bad news that came afterwards. And, incredibly, decades later, when my mum is in her eighties, long widowed and living alone, we start to reminisce one day about those years of my childhood and I mention the story of Lol and Maggie.
    Yes, she remembers it.
    ‘They said he bumped her off, didn’t they?’ she muses. ‘Hmm … well you never knew then, with some of your dad’s friends, what they might get up to.
    ‘But he was a real ladies man. He tried it on with me, in the house, when you were out in the garden. He tried to kiss me – with you around too! I was so embarrassed. And then you came back in! But I never told your father, he’d have gone potty.’
    I’m not surprised Lol fancied my mum; many did. But the spicy revelation still doesn’t solve the mystery of it all. Yet to this day, if I ever hear that song, an icy shiver runs down my spine. Where indeed, was Lol’s heart? And what was the truth about Maggie?

CHAPTER 12
F ARTHINGS
     
    I hated farthings. Coins mean so little now. But they were a big deal to kids back then. You could take the ‘empties’, empty glass bottles of pop, like Corona fizzy lemonade or Tizer (fizzy, red and known as ‘the Appetiser’, a testament to the power of advertising), back to the local off-licence or sweet shop and exchange them for tuppence each. Even now, the ancient pounds, shilling and pence currency, replaced by decimal currency in 1971, carries a potent nostalgia factor. Brass threepenny bits were the most attractive coins to kids, heavier than pennies and they actually bought you an ounce or two of your favourite sweets, neatly served up in a paper bag. Every kid liked threepenny bits. You had spending power.
    But farthings were something else, piffling and irrelevant. You couldn’t buy anything for a farthing with its daft little wren on the front, though they didn’t actually stop being legal tender until 1960. Because they were so titchy, they had a habit of slipping down the sides of sofas or remaining hidden under floorboards for years. So if no one was around, one of my favourite kiddie joys was to chuck a handful of farthings out, right over the top of the landing outside our flat.
    It has to be said, throwing money around for no reason was a bit of a metaphor for the backdrop to my childhood – using money to buy whatever you fancied, never treating it with any respect, blithely assuming there’d be more whenever you needed it. Live for the moment. Tomorrow never comes. All the clichés of careless living. And, essentially, a very ‘street’ way of viewing money, if you ran a busy market stall, traded in black-market goods or took bets in pubs like my father. You could always go out and earn more, even if the method wasn’t strictly legit. And once earned again it was there to spend. Or, in the case of some of my dad’s punters, there to deprive the wife and kids of any extra by putting it on an each-way bet on the 3 o’clock at Redcar. And losing.
    I never had a piggy bank, nor did I ever receive any encouragement to save money. ‘Saving’ was a meaningless word, never heard or discussed at home. After I reached about five, I’d be given the odd sixpence or shilling to spend by myself, frequently in one of the two sweet shops close by. The smaller shop, bang on the corner of our street on Shacklewell Lane, was my favourite: row after row of big glass jars containing aniseed balls, sherbet lemons, gobstoppers, chewy Black Jacks or Fruit Salads. Or there was a delight called a sherbet fizz, white sherbet in a yellow cardboard tube with a liquorice stick to suck out the sherbet. It usually got very messy