Up West by Pip Granger

himself. My mum worked with him, occasionally, in the cloakroom. It was just a bit of money forher. And when she did that, I had to look after my younger brothers. I was only young myself, so it was quite a lot on me, but I had to do it.
    â€˜I remember at one stage my dad had two or three jobs, because he wasn’t very well. He’d had TB and couldn’t settle in to a permanent job and money was very short. I can remember him doing night work, coming home for a couple of hours’ sleep, then going to work at another job. It was very hard going. He worked at a cartoon cinema in Windmill Street a couple of days in the evenings to earn extra money, just letting people in, taking tickets, taking money occasionally. He did lots of things to earn extra money. When I was about fourteen, he got a job with Wall’s, selling ice cream from trays on the trains. I did that with him to earn a bit of pocket money. Going to Southend, walking up and down on the train selling ice creams from the icebox in the guard’s car.’
    Ronnie Mann learned to double up on jobs at an early age. Eventually he would work in the family business, a picture-framer’s in Monmouth Street, but he had wide experience before then. ‘When I was at school, I worked in the late afternoons and Saturdays half-past nine to about half-past three in the butcher’s, or delivering for the greengrocer or the dairy. Saturday morning I did a paper round from seven o’clock to about half-past eight. I think a lot of the kids did them jobs. Some stayed on when they left school. Littlewoods – an iron-monger’s and paint place in Drury Lane – supplied the whole area with paraffin and all that. I can remember two blokesworking there from while they were in school to in to their twenties and thirties.’
    Ronnie elected not to stay in retailing. When he left school he went to work in the market, doubling up with jobs behind the scenes at local theatres. ‘Most of the people in the ’Bury worked locally,’ he remembers. ‘A percentage worked in the market, and a few in the theatres as well. Others worked in the British Museum, the National Gallery or the auction house in Garrick Street. My uncle was a lavatory attendant in Charing Cross Road. I can’t recall anybody having to go more than a small bus ride away.
    â€˜Moss Bros employed quite a few people, storemen and drivers – not necessarily serving, that was probably a stage too far for the ’Bury – and the print used to take a lot of people. There was Harrisons bang opposite us, a huge printmakers and stamp-makers. Both my sisters went in there. If you were lucky, you got a job down Fleet Street, or Odhams in Long Acre, where the
Daily Herald
was printed. Some of the girls worked as waitresses, as Nippies down in Joe Lyons or wherever. A lot of them became sales assistants in the shops around.’
    All this hard work made West Enders appreciate their leisure time, but they tended to spend it close to home. Just as hardly any of my fellow West Enders grew up with a garden, very few of them spoke of going on holiday on a regular basis. I don’t think they were being shy about it: they just didn’t go. Peter Jenkins’s parents presented an exception to the rule. His father insisted on taking his family away for twoweeks in a boarding house in Exmouth, every single year. This made young Peter feel very special. ‘So many people did not get away, because they couldn’t afford it. In comparison with the people on the estate, we were well off. Nobody else from round about went away for a week, let alone a fortnight. They stuck around the estate, and went places for the day; Southend, or the south coast from Waterloo, sometimes Sheerness from Victoria.
    â€˜We used to take day trips of our own, to Littlehampton, Brighton or Bognor Regis, which was exciting in its own way, but there was such a lot of anticipation about the