Up West by Pip Granger Page B

such a darling. Cissie was her name, Cissie Glover. Well, Jessica really, but everybody called her Ciss. She had it hard, but I never, ever, heard her complain. She used to do three cleaning jobs a day to keep her family. Her husband cleared off and left her with seven kids. Well, he cleared offand left her with five, and came back twice and left her with another one each time. And then he cleared off for good, to live, as my mother so delicately put it, with his old tart up at the top of Drury Lane. I never met him, I wasn’t allowed – well, nobody had anything to do with him. But when Nanny talked about it, you could see she still loved him.
    â€˜My grandfather died when I was thirteen. And his old tart came to my mum and said, “Your father’s died,” and my mum said, “Yeah, and?” “Well,” said his tart, “he’s gonna need burying.” “Let him have a pauper’s grave then,” my mum said. “We don’t want anything to do with him.” My mum, she hated him.
    â€˜But then we went down to see Nanny and my mum told her “The old man’s dead.”
    â€˜Poor lamb, I’ll never forget my old nan’s face. It was a mixture of sadness and relief, and I said to her, “Are you all right?” and she went, “I’m all right, love. At least I know where he is, now.”’
    * There were several rookeries in Covent Garden, the most famous being the one huddled around St Giles’s church.
    * Aldridges’ Horse Repository was a very old established horse auctioneers, founded in 1753. Owen remembers that ‘Inside, the stalls where they used to stable the horses prior to them being auctioned – not racehorses, but working horses, cart-horses and so on – were all still there.’
    * The copper was a boiler for heating large quantities of water for wash day. Shaped like a water butt, with a tap to draw off the water, they were heated from below with either gas jets or coal. You got your copper going early, and once the water was hot, drew it off in to buckets and carried it to the sink or tub where you were doing the washing. It was hard graft. The tenements had communal wash houses and a large copper: even new-built council houses in the late forties and fifties had smaller versions, until immersion heaters came along.
    * Seven shillings and sixpence (37.5p) would have been roughly a tenth of the average weekly wage before the war, which for a man was around £4 per week – less for a woman.

4

Playing Out
    One of the greatest contrasts between being a child in the fifties and today is how much freedom we enjoyed back then. We roamed all over the place and our free time was nowhere near as organized as kids’ time is today. Lucky children might have had riding lessons, music lessons or dance, but most did not. The freedom to roam was possible because there was so little traffic. Even in Central London, seeing a car coming towards you as you played hopscotch or football in the street was the exception rather than the rule.
    If we weren’t at school, we spent very little time amusing ourselves at home. It wasn’t just a case of there being no such things as computers or video games; lots of people didn’t even have a television. Because television had been in its infancy when the war began, and the authorities had simply switched it off for the duration, it took a while to get going again. Most people had no access to one at all untilCoronation year, 1953. Even if your family did own a TV, there was hardly anything on. In the fifties, broadcasting hours were very limited indeed. Toys were at a premium, too, because materials and labour had been missing for so long. Once again, it took a while for imported materials to come through, although limited production did begin again in the late forties. Indoor space was limited for many families, especially those who had taken in homeless relatives