Читать книгу Cracked Eggs and Chicken Soup - A Memoir of Growing Up Between The Wars - Norman Jacobs - Страница 7

I’m an old man these days, living out my retirement in a little council house by the sea. Life is content, I have enough to eat and warm clothes for myself and my wife. It’s a funny thing though – often in my dreams now I find myself back in the East End of London of the 1920s and 1930s, and when I wake it takes me a few moments to remember where I am. I have been wondering about the old places – are they still there? Would I recognise the streets and houses any more? So I made up my mind to take a trip down memory lane. And what a trip it was, and what memories it brought back.

So there I was … revisiting Petticoat Lane, standing on the corner of Toynbee Street and Commercial Street. And suddenly I was flooded with memories of a little boy, Ikey Jacobs. Instantly Toynbee Street melted into Shepherd Street, Brune House gave way to the streets I had loved so well as a child. Seventy years started to evaporate and I, being that little boy, was back in my beloved Spitalfields.

Times were hard then, the Great War had not been long over and memories of it were still vivid for the vast majority of people. Poverty lurked in every street, pouncing on this family or that family at its whim. Politicians talked of ‘A land fit for heroes to live in’, but that was a hollow mockery unless of course you were a rich hero; the poor variety had a hard struggle to survive, most old soldiers we knew were maimed, blind, shell-shocked or just too ill to work. Even the able-bodied found jobs hard to come by after the full employment of the war years and general demobilisation of the armed forces.

We were one of those poverty-stricken families, a Jewish one, living in the East End. There were eight of us children, our dad more out of work than in it, Mum worn ragged, no money to speak of and Mosley’s anti-Semitic Blackshirts putting the fear of God into us. Yet somehow we coped through those years of hardship between the wars.

My story as told to me by my parents actually starts even further back in time so let me take you back to 1888, the year the spectre of Jack the Ripper haunted those very same streets of Spitalfields that I was to grow up in and yes, in spite of everything, come to love …

ISAAC JACOBS