Читать книгу London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City - Sidney Day - Страница 10

I got up every morning before six o’clock when me dad hollered up the stairs, ‘Get out of kip!’ I had a cold water wash in the washhouse, scrubbed meself with carbolic soap and then had a cup of tea. I might do the bread run—nine times out of ten we bought stale bread. Me mum would give me her pillowcase and I would take it up to the shop and get it filled for sixpence. When I got back I would have some bread—and jam too, if I could. Then I would get Ruddy out of the coal cellar or find one of me other mates.

There was always people in the street, even early in the morning, sitting on their steps like blackbirds. It was good to get outside and away from the bugs indoors. The bugs was constantly eating away the mortar and the wood. A lot of houses never had wallpaper, only matchboarding painted with green or white limewash. Millions of bugs lived behind that matchboard. Sometimes when me and me brother Jim spotted them we would pick one each going up the wall and have a race. Me mum was always buying stuff to put round the iron bed to try and get rid of them. They sucked yer blood, they would bite terrible and they stank when you squashed them.

One morning, early, I met up with Joey Booth, the youngest of the Booth boys, who was the same age as me. He was pulling our four-wheel cart. It had a plank of wood for a swivel axle, two big pram wheels at the back and two smaller wheels at the front. A lump of rope was the steering wheel.

‘Let’s take the cart out before we have to go to school, Cabby,’ he says.

‘Alright,’ I says.

Everyone called me Cabby cause I spent a lot of time outside the station carrying people’s bags to the cabs for a few pennies. As soon as I see a woman come out with some big cases I would run up and say, ‘Do you want a cab, ma’am?’ and she would say, ‘Yes, please.’ Then I would take the cases over to the cab rank in the middle of St John’s Road.

Joey and I took turns on the cart: one of us pushed while the other drove. Eventually we got to Dartmouth Park Hill. We spotted a baker’s barrow standing on its own. The bloke was down the hill with his basket delivering bread and cakes door to door. We waited till he weren’t looking and crept over to the barrow. There was racks of little loaves and cakes inside and tucked in a corner was a money pouch. Joey reached in and took sixpence out.

It turned out that the bloke always left his barrow there cause he didn’t want to push it back up the hill. So every morning for months and months we took sixpence out of his pouch. There was probably thirty bob in there altogether, but we never took a lot out and he never noticed it was gone. That was a game, that was! We would spend the sixpence on food on our way to school.

When we wasn’t at school we was always outside doing jobs, scrounging or playing in the street. We was never indoors. There was always a big gang of kids playing games in our street. We would line up some screws and aim cherry pips at them to see how many each of us could win—that was called cherry hogging. We would play hopscotch and spinning tops and race each other. We would throw a rope over the arm of a lamppost and swing round and round on it. If it was a summer evening and me dad was sitting on the steps outside our house he might say, ‘There’s a ha’penny for the first one round the block,’ and we would tear off. Sometimes we played a game called ‘Release’. We would chalk a big box on the street and then split into two teams. One side went and hid and the other team had to find them, one by one, and put them in the box. At any time their mates, if it was all clear, could run to the box and holler out ‘Release!’ to free the blokes in the box. We played lots of other games too, but nine times out of ten it was fighting.

Me dad taught me how to fight in the back garden. ‘Cabby Day from Tiger Bay,’ he would sing as he hopped about. ‘The only man to go fifteen rounds with a wasp and never get stung!’ We liked to have street fights with other streets. Our street would go round to Chesnall Road and fight a gang round there. There was the Tiger Bay mob, Raydon Street mob, Doighton Street mob and Dartmouth Hill mob. Each road had its own little mob of hounds. Sometimes we went over to Campbell Bunk in Lower Holloway where me uncle, Tinker Day, lived. It was the worst place in the country I should think; the most violent road there ever was for drunks, prostitution—you name it, it all happened in Campbell Bunk. They burned the floorboards, the joists, the doors—burned everything to keep warm—and nobody dared go near them to ask for any rent. Me own uncle was pretty bad when it come down to it, though I never had much to do with him or me cousins really, apart from going to fight them occasionally with the mob from our street.

When we wasn’t fighting we might try tormenting the old people in the Bay. For our favourite trick we needed a reel of black cotton, a button and a pin. When it was dark we would dig the pin in the putty over the top of a window. Then we tied the button on the cotton and dangled it over. We took the reel across the road and tugged it so that the button kept on tapping on the window of the house, ‘pip, pip’. They would come out, look round and say, ‘What the bleeding hell’s happening here?’ We drove the poor old sods mad with that. They was always telling us off, throwing a bucket of water over us and Gawd knows what else. ‘Sling yer hook out of it,’ they would say, and we would go back to our other games.

There was seasons for the different types of games like cherry hogging and top spinning. We would go from one game to another. There was special times in the year for other things too, like Guy Fawkes. We looked forward to that most of all. Each year we made a guy out of potato sacks stuffed with straw and gave it a mask for a face. Me mother sewed on the arms and the legs for us and we took the guy round the streets in a barrow hollering, ‘Penny for the guy, penny for the guy!’ The best places to go was outside the big hotels. One year we got more than eight shillings in a day doing that. We spent the money on sweets and fireworks for the big bonfire that was lit every year in the middle of our street.

We thought up some other ways to get hold of money, too. Opposite Buckingham’s in Raydon Street there was an off licence run by a woman. All the empty bottles was kept in the side garden in Doighton Street where the lorries loaded and unloaded. I was passing one day with Ruddy and Joey Booth when I had an idea.

I says, ‘Give me a hoof up.’

Ruddy shot me up and over the green doors of the gate. Soon I climbed back with some empty bottles.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ says Joey.

‘Wait here a minute.’

I took the empties into the shop and got tuppence a bottle. After that we was over those bleeding doors all the time. One day the woman in the shop took a long look at me.

She says, ‘Where d’you keep getting all these bottles from?’

I says, ‘Over the hill.’

‘Over the hill?’

I says, ‘Yeah.’

She says, ‘They must do a lot of drinking over there.’

She never did find us out. Daytime, night time, any bleeding time we passed, we would go and get three or four of her own bottles to return to her.

Another time I went into the coal and greengrocer’s shop round the corner in Raydon Street. I crept along, bent down under the window and went through the door. Me mates waited outside. I couldn’t see the owner, Mrs Stevens, so I took a handful of peanuts. Just as I passed the board that divided the vegetables from the coal she sprung out and caught me. She hit me so hard with her broom she knocked me scrabbling into the coal. Then she chased me round and round, over the heap of coal, hitting me all the time till I got out. Me mates was laughing so much they could hardly run. All that for a few bleeding peanuts!