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

to cut all corners, get you whatever you wanted or needed fast. And because you’d paid for a favour in cash, you could always come back for another – with yet another bung, of course.
    As a child, of course, I had no real idea what this really meant; I just heard about it, absorbed it in passing chat between my parents. The legendary world of the poverty stricken East End – where everyone had very little, but helped each other out just the same – didn’t seem to operate that way in our case. Virtually everything my dad did was a trade-off; favours were always paid for in hard cash.
    So while much of the country scrimped, saved, queued and generally endured a bleak, miserable post-war landscape, people like my dad were living it large after the war, simply because they always had the ‘readies’. And, of course, this time was very much a cash culture, though my dad was a big fan of the relationship forged with the bank manager – and postdated cheques. The bank manager too was a frequent recipient of my dad’s largesse. Frequent double scotches in the pub and the well-placed supply of boxes of Havanas were another way of cementing the ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ relationship.
    Officially, my dad and The Old Man ran the formal side of their business from their tiny office, taking telephone bets from customers who ran an account with them. But the lucrative side, of course, was taking cash bets on the street or in the pub, helped by their small team of trusted ‘runners’. A lot of this illicit exchange of cash and betting slips actually went on in the men’s toilet in the pub.
    This way of life, while not actually observed by myself or my mum, still got absorbed into our home life. Knowing and hearing about it as I grew up made me streetwise, to an extent, because all around me the official rules were being broken – with no obvious consequences. But there was one consequence – I grew up with the somewhat warped idea that if anyone did you a favour, big or small, somehow you ‘owed’ that individual, even if the favour was given carelessly or meant little to the other person at the time. You never forgot that personal debt. One good turn deserves another, certainly. But not for ever.
    This distorted belief dominated my life far into adulthood. I firmly believed that if someone did you a personal favour, you were indebted to them. This meant that I was unable to clearly discriminate between a genuine gesture of helpfulness or friendship and one which was primarily made out of self interest, unhelpful, to say the least, in the cut and thrust world of journalism where ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ behaviour is all pervasive. Time and again I’d be shocked to realise how misplaced I’d been in my belief that certain individuals were ‘friends’ because of one helpful, spontaneous gesture which, while I’d clung to it as proof of friendship or loyalty, merely turned out to be directly related to my place in the editorial pecking order. Yet only quite recently did I fully realise where this misplaced view came from. Maybe there were a few genuine cash-free favours around us when I was a child. But I never saw evidence of this.
    Yet there was one memorable occasion when what fell off the back of a lorry, or came into our home from heaven knows where, really did make a big impact on my child’s view of my dad’s wheeling and dealing. It was the night he came home from the George & Dragon with a big diamond ring in his pocket.
    ‘Len-from-the-caff said it was about time I got you one of these,’ said Ginger, producing a small black velvet box from his jacket pocket and plonking it down, without ceremony, on the living room table.
    Len, one of my dad’s older cronies who liked a bet or two, had known my father’s family for years because he ran a busy little café near their shop. He also knew that my parents had had a rushed register office wedding the year after the war started – and