Free Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood by Jacky Hyams Page A

then running back again to collect another saucepan from the kitchen to fill with more cold water to be heated. This, of course, took some time because the gas cooker took ages to warm the pans.
    In my early years, Mum would give up trying to get the Ascot to work and with a sigh, she would get the matches, light the gas on the kitchen cooker, and wait for the saucepan to boil to make me a bath. (Like many of their generation, my parents grew up with the ‘strip wash’ over a basin full of warmed-up water, so my little baths, somehow, tended to take precedence over their own requirements.)
    Then, as I grew bigger, I was allowed to ‘make’ the nightly bath myself, carefully taking each heated saucepan into the bathroom to slosh it into the bath, nervously testing the hot water to see how much cold I could add to move things along and allow me get into the bath to finally splash around.
    Only when I’d reached my early teens did things improve, and better, more efficient water heaters were installed in the kitchen and bathroom, as well as new gas fires that replaced the coal fires in the other rooms. But for me, bathtime as a kid will always be associated with trying to wash myself in a less-than-satisfactory amount of tepid water, always watched by the white Monster over the bath and the flickering pilot light, taunting me endlessly with their power.

CHAPTER 9
A D IAMOND R ING
     
    N ot everyone in our street was as involved as we were in acquiring goods via the thriving black market through the early post-war years. The family who inhabited the condemned house on the corner, the Coopers, and their boy Bobby, or our downstairs’ neighbour Maisie in the ground-floor flat, weren’t likely to splurge on any of the black-market luxuries found in our home: you needed hard cash to continuously take advantage of it.
    While the post-war black market still prevailed across the country, in London’s Petticoat Lane, the city’s oldest, established, unruly trading post, it boomed. All sorts of things found their way to the Lane, virtually everything you couldn’t officially buy in those times of lean living, to be sold with a nudge and a wink: ciggies, nylons, off-ration expensive clothing, small items of furniture, booze and all kinds of tinned foods were frequently available – right up until the time rationing officially ended in 1954.
    In my dad’s bookie world of punters, spivs and runners, ignoring the regulations and using black-market goods to trade for favours was as normal as going to the pub, picking up bets and boozing.
    Big bottles of whisky, expensive French perfume, packs of shiny seamed stockings, tins of red salmon or canned sliced peaches, different kinds of cosmetics, soaps and toiletries frequently found their way into our little flat, luxuries my mother soon took for granted, along with the large wooden boxes of the finest Havana cigars that took pride of place on our mantelpiece, or the curved white containers with brightly coloured plastic labels containing exotica like sticky dates, that sometimes piled up in our pantry.
    Even with coupons, you couldn’t buy these things freely in the shops. But Ginger frequently reached for his wad of cash to peel off a few notes for such items when they were offered to him by stallholders or drinking pals, even if we didn’t really need them. Sometimes, of course, we wouldn’t see the things he had purchased in our home: they’d form part of a trade-off for a favour my dad had done or owed someone.
    But while passing over black-market goods as tips was one thing, my dad had a consistent habit of getting whatever he wanted: the ‘bung’, cockney slang for a bribe, cash slipped into the right hand to open a hitherto closed door or facilitate a favour. Bungs were a way of life on his territory.
    My dad used the bung in various ways. He was a generous tipper too, beloved by the cabbies who brought him home nightly, but primarily, his philosophy was using the bung