Читать книгу Cracked Eggs and Chicken Soup - A Memoir of Growing Up Between The Wars - Norman Jacobs - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

THE TENTERGROUND AND PULLOCKS, 1915–26

‘Come ’ere, you little schmuck!’ I was in trouble with Mr Lipschitz yet again. And all because I shouted out, ‘’Evening, Mr Lipshit,’ as I ran past him on the stairs. Was it my fault I kept forgetting the ‘z’ at the end of his name? ‘You show a bit of respect and call me by my proper name or I’ll speak to your mother,’ he shouted after me as I ran out in to the street. His threat didn’t worry me as Mum had no time for him anyway. The first time he told her what I’d said, she took me to one side and said, ‘Don’t you worry about old Shitty Lips, he’s just a bloody Pullock. He’s got no right to be here anyway.’

Jack Lipschitz was a tailor who lived on the ground floor of our three-storey house in Palmer Street. He was a recent immigrant, hence to us a Pullock.

Palmer Street was in Spitalfields, in an area known as the Tenterground, a name which referred to the fact that this had once been a large open area used for drying newly manufactured cloth. While still wet, this cloth was hooked onto frames called tenters and stretched taut so that the cloth would dry flat and square. The area the tenters stood on was known as a tenterground. There were several around but this particular one in Spitalfields was first established in the seventeenth century by refugee French Huguenot weavers, who were fleeing religious persecution. The establishment of their clothing industry in the area gave rise to a number of the local street names, so, as well as Tenter Street itself, there were names such as Fashion Street and Petticoat Lane.

By the early nineteenth century, the Huguenot weavers had left the area, and between 1829 and 1850, the Tenterground was developed for housing being populated mainly by Dutch Jews, who had immigrated from the Netherlands, which gave rise to the area being generally known in the early days as the Dutch Tenterground.

By the time we moved there, well over 90 per cent of the population was Jewish. But just because we were all Jewish didn’t mean we all got on. There was a big divide between those Dutch Jewish families who had been in England a long time and now saw themselves as basically English Jews and those who arrived in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century as a result of the latest pogrom in some Eastern European state or other, mainly following the assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II by a Jew, in 1881.

All foreign Jews were called ‘Pullocks’ by English Jews, no matter which part of Europe they came from. Pullock was a slang word for Polish. Should Mum be having a few words with a Pullock she would tell her to go back to Russia, geography not being her strong point. Then again, if we had words with a gentile family they would tell us to go back to Palestine, so it evened itself out.

Unlike these Pullocks, our family could trace its roots in England back to the 1660s and we were amongst the first Jewish families to be allowed into England after Oliver Cromwell had revoked the old medieval prohibition, the 1290 Edict of Expulsion, on Jews living in the country. Having been anglicised for so long we spoke no Hebrew, though our talk did contain a fair smattering of Yiddish, due to mixing with so many other Jews in everyday life where Yiddish was almost a first language for some.

The Tenterground consisted of six streets in the form of a ladder, the two uprights being Shepherd Street and Tenter Street, and going across like four rungs were, starting at the Commercial Street end, Butler Street, Freeman Street, Palmer Street and Tilley Street. This complex was encompassed by White’s Row, Bell Lane, Wentworth Street and finally Commercial Street.

There were about ten houses on each side of our street. They were terraced with three floors, ground, first and top. Each floor had two rooms, the front room overlooking the street and the back room overlooking the yard. All the downstairs front windows had shutters.

When anybody called at the house and the front door was shut the recognised procedure was one knock for the ground floor, two for the first floor and of course three for the second floor. Most times though, the doors were just left open and if anyone wanted to come and see us they’d just walk in and up to our flat. Mum and her friends in particular were forever going in and out of each other’s houses either to borrow something or just for a natter. No worries about anyone breaking in to steal anything as we never had anything worth stealing.

The house we lived in was home to three families, each occupying one floor. Mr Lipschitz and his family lived on the ground floor. He was a working tailor who used his two rooms as a workshop.

He had a sewing machine in his front room where his wife and their daughter Hetty worked. There was also a sewing machine and long bench for ironing in the back. He did all the ironing whilst his brother, Lippy, worked the back room sewing machine. All the work was stored in a big shed behind the house. In the summer Jack Lipschitz did all the pressing in the yard, where there was a brick fire for the irons. These four people lived and slept there too; how they found the room, I never knew.

Up one flight of stairs to a small landing saw the door to Solly Norton’s two rooms, which he shared with his wife Polly and son Ascher, who was about my age. Although they lived in the same slum building as us and with as much room as us, they seemed to be a bit better off, probably because there were only three mouths to feed. They had a proper matching table and chairs as well as a proper sideboard. There was also a big pink upholstered armchair, which looked very inviting but seemed to be permanently occupied by Solly.

More importantly, they also had the first gramophone I ever saw, the type with the big horn. When I was older I would often go down and play with Ascher, just so I could hear this marvel of modern technology. The records they played most were of the old music hall stars like Marie Lloyd, Gus Elen and Florrie Forde. The songs were all very familiar to me because my mum and dad were great lovers of the old music hall and were always singing their songs round the house; Dad in particular used to give us full renditions of many a Gus Elen song at the drop of a hat. Ascher also had a few ‘up-to-date’ jazz records with artistes such as Louis Armstrong, Paul Whiteman and Jelly Roll Morton, though I don’t think his parents were too keen on them – a bit too modern – so we only played them when they were out.

The Nortons kept a fruit stall in that world-famous market, Petticoat Lane, or, as it was known to us, simply the Lane. To residents of the Tenterground, the Lane was the part of Wentworth Street that ran between Commercial Street and Middlesex Street rather than Middlesex Street itself.

Up another flight to another very small landing where the door to our front room faced you. The landing then continued as a narrow passage to the right, showing the back-room door.

When we first moved in there were only the five of us, but this gradually increased to ten as more and more brothers and sisters came along over the years. Living on the top floor with this ever-expanding family brought with it many problems, particularly for Mum, not the least of which was getting the ever-present perambulator up and down the stairs, accompanied by at least one or two toddlers who would occasionally take it upon themselves to tumble down the stairs.

The fact that we only had one lavatory between the three families and that it was outside in the back yard along with the one (cold) water tap didn’t help either, as we had to carry up all the water we required and then take the dirty water down again to dispose of it. There was no inside loo or water.