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

job in Foots Cray throughout nearly four years of war. He’d been working alongside his father Jack in the family business in the East End just before war broke out. Jack was a commission agent (a polite word for bookmaker) so my dad, technically a commission agent’s clerk, was accustomed to a desk job. But the sudden posting overseas with the Pay Corps, destination unknown – until his first letters had started to arrive from faraway India – had been an unexpected separation. They’d hoped to see out the war together in London.
    But while Molly shared with millions the all-too-common uncertainty of a loved one thousands of miles away, what no one knew that cold January night was that Sarah was quietly nursing a tragic secret, one she couldn’t bring herself to reveal to anyone.
    Just a week before, there’d been an unexpected knock at the front door in the early afternoon. Apart from her bedridden mother, no one else was at home. Rita was at the shops and Oliver had gone for one of his long walks; Molly had taken me to briefly visit a friend living in separate lodgings in a nearby street.
    Sarah stared at the man on the doorstep. He’d arrived by bike; he looked terribly young. He had a telegram in his gloved hand.
    ‘Are you Mrs Lang?’ he said, his voice low, hating his job, the war, the winter.
    ‘Yes I am,’ said Sarah, the fear and dread already rising in her, wanting to slam the door shut in the young man’s face and run away for ever.
    Sarah knew exactly what this meant. You heard about it often enough. Sometimes you dreamed that it was happening to you.
    But like the polite, self-contained woman she was, she took the envelope, thanked the man politely, closed the front door and walked slowly into the kitchen to read its contents. At first, she just stared at the words in the telegram. Then she reread it over again. But she didn’t cry. She just heated up some water in the kettle, lit the gas and made herself a cup of tea. Later, she tore the hated piece of paper into a hundred tiny pieces. It would be months before she let herself weep. And then, of course, she couldn’t stop.
    Sarah was thirty, with a career in the Civil Service. The very opposite of my mum who was pretty, lively and flirtatious, Sarah was studious, serious and quite prim; by then, no one had really expected her to marry. Yet until the telegram arrived, she’d been a married woman for six months. She had met Anton, an Austrian Jewish refugee who’d enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, at a dance in London. In typical wartime fashion, there’d been a rushed courtship and a proposal just before he was due to be posted overseas.
    ‘But what if you don’t come back?’ asked Sarah when they discussed it all.
    ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come back,’ he said confidently. ‘The war will be over soon, anyway.’
    After their register office wedding, Anton was posted overseas, somewhere in Europe. They’d managed just one weekend together in London as man and wife. Now he was dead. Killed by a devastating V2 rocket attack on a packed Antwerp cinema, while on brief leave visiting his brother in Belgium. 567 people died in that attack on the Rex in Antwerp, the highest single death toll from one rocket attack during the war in Europe. It happened just four days before I was born in the castle.
    Sarah kept her sad secret through that miserable Leeds winter of 1945. Only after Bella’s funeral in April, weeks before VE Day in May signalled the official end of the war, did she blurt out the truth to her family.
    ‘I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it what with mum lying there in such pain and you with the baby,’ she told Molly.
    Shocked, Molly had comforted her widowed sister as best she could. At that point, it looked like tears and sorrow had virtually engulfed their life. Nursing Bella through her last few weeks of pain and anguish, helpless at watching a loved one suffer, would haunt the sisters for many years to come. Yet