More Than Just Coincidence

Chapter Two The Number 8 Bus

My dad cycled to work every morning and, as a small child, I was sometimes allowed to go with him, propped on the crossbar of his bike. He would weave his way through the City traffic and, as we approached Tower Hill, the Mint would suddenly appear, more imposing even than Buckingham Palace. On entering the building we followed long corridors whose high ceilings were studded with chandeliers, my father pausing to speak to important-looking men in rooms where plush, draped curtains swirled on polished floors. I wandered around, looking up at fine old paintings on the walls as they talked of ‘bonuses’, ‘incentives’ and ‘demarcation’. Then I would descend with my father to the furnace room, where ‘his men’ were waiting for him. After the graciously appointed upper offices, it was a vision of hell.

As soon as the door to this inferno opened I was hit by a blast of searing heat. At first, dazzled by the light, I could make out no more than the black silhouettes of men heaving long-handled pans of molten metal. As my eyes adjusted the smiling faces of my father’s colleagues would come into focus: they always made a huge fuss of me because I was ‘Bill Wassmer’s kid’. Boiled sweets or spearmint gum would be pressed upon me while locker doors were hastily and courteously closed on the busty pin-ups glued alongside photos of Billy Fury or Elvis.

The men looked up to my father because he was their shop steward. Before long they would have even greater reason to respect him: he was soon to engage in what would turn out to be a long drawn-out battle over plans to relocate the Royal Mint to Wales. It was a mission that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life and in the process he would cross swords with three chancellors of the exchequer.

When I was seven I moved up to the local primary school, which was named after the great Labour MP and former leader of the party, George Lansbury, who had been a prominent campaigner for social justice and improved living and working conditions in the East End. My father thought that entirely appropriate for a good shop steward’s kid. I was too big by this time to ride to the Mint on his crossbar, but old enough, he decided, to be introduced to some of his other interests. A keen sportsman, my dad had been an amateur boxer as a young man and taught me how to spar when I was only six or seven. I was, he informed me as I ducked and weaved in the garden, ‘a southpaw’. Before I was born he had travelled around the country, accompanied by my mother, to compete in darts tournaments. In our cluttered living room an elegant grandfather clock stood trapped behind an armchair. Only part of the inscription was visible: ‘Bill Wassmer—Champion…’. The rest of it didn’t matter. That was all a little girl needed to know about her dad.

Although we took care not to disturb Will and Carrie by treading too heavily on the floorboards, behind the closed doors of our flat it was never quiet. My mother couldn’t tolerate silence, especially at night. It was like death to her. Consequently clocks ticked perpetually in the bedroom and sitting room, and whenever one of them stopped, it would be wound up instantly, as if it were a heartbeat needing to be restarted. All through the daylight hours, either the radio would be blaring or LPs would be spinning on a turntable, playing soulful ballads by Ray Charles or Frank Ifield. I learned to switch off from my surroundings while reading or writing my stories. On Sundays, however, we listened to comedy radio programmes together, The Navy Lark or Round the Horne. I laughed along with my parents, though the double entendres went over my head. I was just happy that they were happy. If I could make them laugh myself, I thought, what a great thing that would be.

All children are eager to please but, looking back, there was an extra dimension to my desire to make my parents smile. My mother’s permanent anxiety had instilled in me, if only on a subconscious level, a desire to ‘protect’ her. So I avoided doing or telling her anything that might upset her and instead began to try to amuse her. I developed a repertoire, performing passable impressions for my parents of the eccentric upper-crust actress Margaret Rutherford, or Ethel Merman giving her all to ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’.

Downstairs in one of Aunt Carrie’s front rooms there was a piano. I couldn’t read music, but with the easier pieces it was hardly rocket science working out which note on the sheet music corresponded to which piano key, and I taught myself to play ‘Für Elise’.

‘D’you hear that? Beethoven! The child’s a genius!’ cried my family.

I accepted all attention and applause gratefully, a slightly precocious little girl seeking her place in a household of adults.

I might have been presenting a façade of maturity, but while I perceived problems in the way an adult would, I didn’t yet have the emotional resources to deal with them. Left to my own devices much of the time, I relied on my thought processes rather than on emotions to find solutions. By now I realised that my family wasn’t different. There was always an unspoken acknowledgement between my father and me that my mother was ‘sensitive’. I may have wondered whether she was the one who needed taking care of, but these matters were never discussed by any of us. So I laughed and clowned, wanting no more than for my mother to be happy and my dad to be proud of me.

I can see now how this atmosphere of denial, of avoiding difficult issues, influenced most of the decisions I took throughout their lives, and certainly the biggest I ever made in mine.

I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets. I can’t have been more than about seven when, at a loose end on a Sunday afternoon, I started poking about in our bedroom. With my parents’ double bed and my single one shoehorned into such a small space, the room was crammed with furniture. An old utility dressing table was wedged behind my bed and though it was almost impossible to open its drawers completely my small hands could reach right inside them. There I found a stash of interesting papers: my birth certificate, a black-edged death certificate for an Irish grandmother I had never met and my parents’ wedding certificate, on which my father was described as ‘bachelor’. Next to my mother’s name was an entry I could read but did not understand. She was described as ‘the divorced wife of George Townsend’.

Later that evening, while my parents were watching television, I broached the subject of my discovery. ‘What does “the divorced wife of George Townsend” mean?’

They exchanged glances.

‘It’s a mistake,’ said my father. ‘The man who wrote the certificate got things wrong.’

I sensed this wasn’t the whole story. Over the years I would ask them again and again about the wedding certificate. I knew from the awkward looks they always gave one another that they were hiding something. I would be grown up and my father would be dead before I finally got the truth out of my mother.

The constant need to ensure they did nothing that might give rise to complaints made domestic life very stressful for my parents. Any storm in a teacup could mean the difference between keeping our leaking roof over our heads and being thrown out on to the street. An incident that occurred when I was eight brought home to me just how potent was their fear of being made homeless. The man next door had a large pigeon coop in his garden and lost a fair number of his birds to the neighbourhood cats. One day he decided enough was enough and erected a high fence of timber-framed chicken wire on top of the existing one, extending its height to ten or twelve feet. It surrounded the entire garden—including the sloping roof of the outside toilet beneath the upstairs kitchen window—giving it the appearance of an incongruously sited tennis court.

Carrie and Will, always prone to peculiar home improvements and evidently taken by the idea, chose to follow suit. Almost overnight more chicken-wire fencing went up, blocking Tiddles’ route from our kitchen window to the garden. Negotiations immediately began on the cat’s behalf, with my father calling upon his considerable negotiating skills to try to reach an agreement with Carrie and Will while my mother used all her charm on our neighbour. Neither side would budge. They were all determined that their gardens would remain cat-free zones.

Tiddles suffered, scratching and mewing to go out and trying without success to find a way through the impossibly high fence from the sloping roof of our outside loo. He fretted and caterwauled and soiled both the rooms in which we lived. My animal-loving mother simply couldn’t comprehend how anyone, let alone members of our own family, could do this to our pet. In the end it fell to my father to solve the problem.

A week later, I learned that my dad had secured a new home for Tiddles with a kind elderly lady on a country farm. There he could spend the remainder of his days with all the space in the world to roam. I was heartbroken to be losing him but I had witnessed his appalling distress and understood there was no other way. My mother put on a brave face but her eyes were red on the morning of his departure. We owned no cat basket for his journey so my dad had decided to improvise with a holdall. Tiddles took one look at it and disappeared under the sofa. I tempted my old tom cat out far enough to grab him by the scruff of his burly neck and stuff him into the bag. He struggled as I zipped it up. My parents looked on as I told Tiddles firmly it was for his own good. Suddenly the cat was quiet. My father took the holdall and quickly left the house. Immediately the front door clicked shut behind him my mother burst into tears, confirming the fear that had been growing in my mind all morning.

‘He’s not going to a farm, is he?’

My mum shook her head. ‘Your dad’s taking him to be put down because people don’t want him in their gardens,’ she said bitterly.

She began to sob and I joined in, wracked with guilt over the part I had played in sending Tiddles to his death. So much for happy endings.

After that, my mother refused ever again to speak to the man next door, which was hardly fair since Tiddles’s fate had in truth been sealed by Carrie and Will. But because of our dependence on their goodwill, she was never able to confront them over the matter. It was another reminder of how little control my parents exercised over their own lives. My mum’s hope was that, one day, the council would eventually rehouse us, she would have some autonomy over her own household and I would have a room to myself. But it became increasingly apparent that we were low priority as far as the council was concerned. I was the only child in the family so, theoretically at least, we were not overcrowded. Until our turn came the only escape for my parents was work by day and the pub or racetrack by night.

I regularly went dog racing with my dad but my mother rarely joined us. Perhaps she was secretly jealous of my father’s passion, since even on their wedding day, she claimed, he had deserted her at the pub reception to catch the last few races at the Wick.

As a small child at the track I would be surrounded by men standing on tiptoe, jostling, pushing and jabbing rolled-up racecards in the air, all eyes fixed on six greyhounds tearing round a wide circuit after an electric hare.

‘Gertcha, four!’

‘Get out there, six!’

My father would put his strong arm around me, sheltering me from the shoving men but, just like theirs, his gaze would be on the finishing line as he willed his dog towards it. Racing greyhounds had names like Mick the Miller, Prairie Peg or Pigalle Wonder. No Rovers or Fidos here. I would look up at my father, seeing how tall he rose above the other men—a giant with thick, grey, curly hair.

The second the race ended I would know from the expression on his face whether he had won or lost; whether he was crushed, excited or simply relieved to have held on to some of his money with a place bet. He would tell me the numbers of the winning dogs so that I could check the hundreds of discarded betting slips on the ground to make sure none of them had been thrown away by mistake. I never once came across a winning ticket but it kept me busy while he made his next selection. I would find him at the Tote, asking a lady behind a metal grille for ‘six to win’ then ‘four and six about’. Greyhound betting was complicated, perhaps even to some adults: there were forecast bets, reverse forecasts, quinellas, triellas and accumulators; bets on ‘win’ dogs or dogs to come first or second or in either order.

My father would take his tickets, put them carefully in his pocket, engulf my small hand in his and sweep me along to the bookies near the track. They stood on boxes, chalking and re-chalking the changing odds on their blackboards, all the while keeping an eagle eye on the Gladstone bags full of cash at their feet. Once my dad had studied the dogs in the enclosure I was allowed to choose one. I knew that head down and tail between the legs were good signs. If we won, we’d make for the track caff for a celebration supper. The latest thing was Russian salad, which consisted of tinned mixed vegetables in warm salad cream. My father was in his element. This was his favourite place in all the world.

My mum found a different way to relax. After a hard shift at the coffee house she would come home and do the housework, tidying, cleaning and trying to find somewhere to store everything. Clothes went into the sideboard and my school socks hung over dinner plates in a rack on the cooker. It must have been so demoralising for her. When she had finished she would light up her first Rothmans cigarette of the day, her hand trembling uncontrollably until all the stress began to drain out of her. Then she would get herself ready for a night out at the Bridge House: hair teased, combed and lacquered to within an inch of its life, cheekbones rouged, nose powdered, lips painted, comfortable work shoes replaced by stiletto heels. A black patent handbag filled with make-up and tissues and a coat with a real fur collar completed the look. I marvelled at the transformation—to me she was more beautiful than the star of any movie.

Sometimes we would all go to the Bridge House, where the landlady would allow me to sit on a stool behind the bar with Sandy, the pub dog, perched on my lap. I dipped cheese and onion crisps into glasses of Britvic tomato juice, watching the customers lose their inhibitions along with their sobriety, breaking into song, tears or laughter as the mood took them. At other times, my mother, the night owl, went alone. It was only a five-minute walk but one that involved passing the coal merchant’s dark and menacing forecourt. Late at night, I’d listen for the familiar footsteps, the sound of her heels clicking on the pavement outside, sometimes with a tipsy trip, signalling that all was well.

My world then was bounded by a handful of landmarks: school, the dog track, the pub and the Rex picture house. But somewhere out there, past Spitalfields and the City, was the West End, where my mother took me twice a year to have my hair cut by the children’s hairdresser at Selfridges. ‘Curly cut,’ she would instruct. ‘Parting on the left.’ I would sit in the elegant salon watching the snowy-white muslin curtains at the windows waft gracefully in the breeze. Afterwards came the scent of eau-de-Cologne as gentle fingers massaged my scalp. Looking back, it’s hard for me to fathom why my mum chose to splash out on such a treat for me, let alone how she could have afforded it on her wages. Perhaps she just wanted one luxury for her child. Perhaps, for half an hour twice a year, it was a treat for her, too, to allow herself to imagine she shared the lifestyle of people who had their hair cut at Selfridges as a matter of course.

Apart from such outings, the West End remained as much of a mystery to me as Venice and the Bridge of Sighs in The Book of Knowledge. Then, one evening at dusk, I saw Great Uncle Will striding down our street dressed in a stunning military-style costume: epaulettes perched on each shoulder, gold braiding across his chest. I thought he must have joined the cavalry. The real source of this splendid uniform turned out to be even more glamorous. He had been for a job interview and was now a newly appointed commissionaire at the London Palladium. Off he would go each evening, returning in the early hours of the morning with tales of having opened a door for Frank Sinatra or Marlene Dietrich. I realised now that the West End was within reach. Somewhere at the top of the road, a number 8 bus could take you out of the East End and into a wonderful world full of stars and endless possibilities.

Chapter Three By Hope, By Work, By Faith

I am nine years old and my teacher at George Lansbury primary school is a woman called Joyce LeWars. She is from Jamaica and walks with her head held high, proud, strutting—her body so curvy it seems to have been drawn from a series of circles. I creep up behind her when she’s climbing stairs and hear her humming a strange but cheerful tune. I wish I could join in. She’s the happiest person I know.

Before Mrs LeWars, primary school had been a strict and forbidding place revolving around the three Rs and the slipper. Our teachers had all been middle-aged men in tweed jackets, and women who wore milk-bottlebottom glasses. And before Mrs LeWars, I had only seen one other black person in my life: a tall stranger wearing a Homburg hat and white suit, baggy trousers flapping wide in the breeze as he strode through Roman Road market. No one knew where he had come from or where he was going, but all heads had turned—adults fearful, children fascinated.

Mrs LeWars inspired the same fascination. She managed her class with just the right mixture of authority and praise and was everyone’s mum, encouraging us all in equal measure. We spent long, hot summer afternoons writing essays and stories which she would take home for her own five children to read. They joined us one summer at a school camp in the countryside—two dozen East End kids suddenly transplanted to rural Surrey to tramp around potteries and old churches. More accustomed to playing in the wartime bombsites that still existed in London in the early 1960s, we now found ourselves let loose on a more natural landscape. We screamed as we galloped like runaway horses down the Devil’s Punchbowl—an impressively deep, dry valley sculpted by water long ago, we were told. The next day someone complained of a sore throat, brought on not by screaming, it was discovered, but by a raging virus. Those who didn’t end up in sick bay took it home with them and suffered there.