Up West by Pip Granger Page A

two weeks in Devon: we sent the trunk ahead for a start. Passenger Luggage in Advance. You’d put the labels on your trunk, and that was ever so exciting, because it meant holiday time was near, and then the week before you were going, you walked across Waterloo Bridge with Dad to the station, to buy the tickets.’
    John Carnera’s father, Secundo, was another who could not bear the thought of going without a holiday, but while the Jenkinses went to Devon, the Carneras had other destinations in mind. ‘My dad only had two places he wanted to go on holiday ever in his life. One was Sequals, in Italy, where we came from. We used to go every three years, because that’s all we could afford, but when we went, it was for two or three months. We’d go in August and stay through the harvest period. That’s when it was best to be in Italy, at harvest-time: the wine harvest, the corn, and all the rest of it.
    â€˜And if we didn’t go there, we used to go to Brighton. Dadloved Brighton, and I loved the piers. I used to save up every year to spend time on the penny machines. My week’s holiday at Brighton was spent on those machines. I used to hate the shingle beach, where you were – ow! ow! ow! – limping all the way down to the water’s edge because of the stones, you know, then you’d get in and it was stone cold, absolutely freezing. It wasn’t my idea of fun at all. I just wanted to go on one of the piers and spend all my pennies. I used to love that. There was the Executioner, where they cut off the bloke’s head, shooting games where you had to shoot cats with a pistol, ones with ghosts coming out of cupboards and laughing policemen. One year, I saved three shillings and tenpence. You can’t imagine how rich I felt, like a multimillionaire, and I could not wait to get on those machines. That three and ten was burning a hole in my pocket. I got rid of it in about two days, I think.’
    As I researched this book, I came to realize that I was not only collecting stories about the way people lived in the forties, fifties and early sixties, but also stories of earlier generations, passed down from parents and grandparents and often taking them deep into the area’s past. Ann Lee, for example, can trace an ancestor back to the Bow Street Runners – the family retains custody of the truncheon – and Mike O’Rouke’s family were Covent Gardeners back to at least ‘great-grandfather days’. The Mann family business was set up in Monmouth Street in 1849 by Ronnie’s great-great-grandfather.
    I heard about the way people came to England with little or no money and no English at all, looking for work, working hard and setting up businesses. I heard stories of sacrifice, hard work and humour, of people doing the best they could to get by and to bring up families with pitifully few resources. Olga Jackson, for example, remembers how her grandparents lived: ‘My grandfather was a painter and decorator, and my grandmother did anything she could, and must have done that from a very early age, because she was so poor. I think she was a wet nurse at one time. She did everything. They lived in a flat in an apartment house, in Shelton Street. There was no running water, or toilet, or anything upstairs. They were four floors up and they had to go all the way down to the bottom just to get water. Every drop had to be dragged upstairs and lumped down again.’
    Ann Lee told me about her mother’s mother, who had brought up a large family in the Wild Street Buildings, despite being rendered briefly homeless when Hitler demolished J Block. The more I heard of Nan Glover, the more I liked her, and she’ll turn up again in this book. For me, she sums up the stoicism, sensibilities and spirit of the working-class Londoners who lived through the wars and tried to make the best of the peace for their children and grandchildren. ‘My nan was