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

because the liquorice would go all soggy. But the fizzy sherbet was a real buzz. Or you could get four Black Jacks (aniseed-flavoured black squares) for a penny that kept you chewing for ages. But if any kid tried to buy ‘just one Black Jack’ with a farthing, the request was usually greeted with a shake of the head. Everyone knew farthings were unacceptable – but of course, kids would try, just the same, if that was all they had.
    Despite rationing, sweet shops were as ubiquitous then as high-street mobile phone stores are now; the biggest and the best was on Kingsland Road, next door to the ABC cinema and opposite the 649 bus stop. It did a roaring trade once rationing restrictions ended. Amazingly, the site of the other nearest sweet shop on the opposite side of Shacklewell Lane remains there to this day, a newsagents and corner store nowadays surrounded by what were then big factory buildings, and now converted into trendy flats.
    It was a very big day in my sugarlustful world, when sweet rationing formally ended in 1953, the year the Queen got to wear her crown in public for the first time: as a reward for helping keep her in business, we kids got as many sweets as we could afford.
    It was a cold, wet February morning, yet I virtually dragged my mum down the Kingsland Road, past the market to a sweet shop next door to Sainsbury’s where, rumour had it, you could actually buy as many Crunchie bars as you wanted. But alas, the word had already spread through the streets of Dalston and beyond. By the time we got there, their stock of Crunchies had nigh on vanished. But even so, when we left, me triumphantly clutching the last two Crunchies in their purple wrappers, one in each little gloved hand, it was a memorable moment. Even if, for a greedy little chocoholic, two could never be enough: did I mention that one of the first baby words I uttered was ‘choc-a-choc’?
    By then, at around age 9, I was developing an avid reading habit, so the bulk of my ever-increasing pocket money, now half a crown (or two shillings and sixpence), usually had a focus beyond the sweet shop: buying books and magazines from the shops on Kingsland Road. Initially, the glossy picture books with Royals were top of my list, later came the weekly delight of magazines like School Friend . (The Silent Three were a favourite, three boarding-school girls who wore robes and hoods – early hoodies? – and went round the place doing good deeds anonymously.) Then later I developed the Photoplay movie mag habit.
    At the same time, when it became apparent I had such a hunger for books, my mum steered me in the direction of our two local libraries, one in Dalston Lane (small, but nearly always had an Enid Blyton I hadn’t yet discovered like Mallory Towers or The Famous Five ) and a less-frequented one a bit further away in Farleigh Road, Stoke Newington. Jean Plaidy, who wrote many historical novels, became another big favourite. I devoured her books.
    Yet there was another free library for me at home too: my dad was a voracious reader in those early post-war years, a regular Daily Mirror buyer and a consumer of London’s three evening papers of the time. ‘Star, News and Standard!’ was a familiar sound then on every London street corner; Ginger would often come home and chuck all three on the sofa, keeping his work-related newspaper, Sporting Life , folded up in his overcoat pocket.
    My parents’ bedroom boasted a small, cheap wooden bookcase with a collection of paperbacks about the war, hardbacks too from authors like Somerset Maugham ( Liza of Lambeth ) H.E. Bates ( Fair Stood the Wind for France ) Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (a naughty one which I flicked through, but didn’t really understand at that age) and Nevil Shute ( A Town Like Alice ). I didn’t read them all, of course, but later, the slightly more salacious ones like My Wicked, Wicked Ways , an autobiography by movie star Errol Flynn written just before he died,