Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Read Free

instinctive reaction. Had the vicar’s child been a girl, however, it’s quite possible that Molly would have innocently gone back to Leeds with the wrong baby.
    And so I came into the world as a near miss, almost a vicar’s child by a hair’s breadth. A mistake by a nervous young girl could have led to a very different fate, growing up in a chilly northern parsonage, my early life ruled by the diktat of the Church, rather than an East London Jewish kid growing up in a squalid building abutting a bombsite with doting parents who lived for the moment, without too much thought for the future. Or of God, come to that.
    So there it is, my arrival in a medieval castle, cast into a chilly world where chaos and confusion reigned. The castle, so ancient it is mentioned in the Doomsday Book , is now an upmarket luxury hotel, reputed to be haunted. And guests have been known to report hearing a baby cry long into the night. Even when there were no babies around at the time …

CHAPTER 2
A T ELEGRAM
     
    L ike millions of other families, our lives were mired in chaos and uncertainty in the months just before the war ended. We too had our share of bad news as we struggled through the early months of 1945 in our temporary lodgings in Roxholme Grove, Leeds.
    In an upstairs bedroom, my grandmother, Bella, lay dying from breast cancer. Molly, helped by her sisters Sarah and Rita, did her best for their mum, helping wash and get her to the toilet, trying hard to tempt her to eat. Outwardly, they acted as if this was a temporary situation – and that she would gradually recover. But everyone knew in their hearts it was hopeless. A doctor had made it clear they could expect the worst.
    ‘Nothing to be done,’ he told them bluntly. ‘Just try to make sure she eats and drinks whatever she can.’ Back then, there was no option of an NHS hospital bed for a sixty-seven-year-old with a terminal illness; indeed, there was no National Health Service, no morphine to dull the pain, no Macmillan cancer nurses; just another war-weary family struggling to cope with a world turned upside down.
    Tears slowly trickled down Bella’s pale, shrunken face the day Molly came home from the castle with her precious bundle. She’d been quite brave up till then, despite the terrible pain. But she broke down when she saw me for the first time.
    ‘I’ll never see her grow up,’ she sobbed, while my grandfather, Oliver, hovered at her bedside, unsure of his place in a sickroom.
    Still fit and dapper in his seventies, Oliver coped with his wife’s distress by leaving the room. In fact, he left the house as often as was decently possible. Ignoring the harsh northern winter, smartly dressed in his pinstripe suit and big overcoat, he went out for long walks most days. He had been a good provider for his family of eight children, working long hours as a tailor and cutter to the fine ladies who shopped in the big London department stores in the early 1900s. Even in the thirties, when times became more difficult, he’d managed to keep working. As a husband, however, he fell short: his daughters knew all too well that their parents’ marriage had been an unhappy liaison, arranged by their respective Jewish families just months before the pair had fled the Russian pogroms (the anti-Jewish violence that swept across Russia in the late 1800s) to settle in England.
    In St Petersburg, Bella, eighteen, had fallen in love with a neighbour, a handsome young Russian boy. But he wasn’t Jewish. So her parents had promptly married her off to Oliver, who was.
    Already in the late stages of pregnancy when the couple boarded the boat for the long journey to England, Bella and Oliver’s first child, Jane, was born prematurely on the boat – and remained stateless throughout her life. Bella had struggled to adjust to their new life in London as pregnancy had followed pregnancy for the better part of fifteen years. Later in life, she’d confided to her daughters that