Читать книгу London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City - Sidney Day - Страница 11

Alice was the eldest of us kids. She had long black hair right down her back and she was a greedy cow. She would sit cracking nuts by the fire and not give you a shell. I didn’t live with her for long cause she went into service when she was fifteen and then got married and moved to the other end of the street.

Bill was the oldest boy. He was smart and good looking with tight curly hair and he was always joking. He worked in the building with me dad and sometimes gave me a penny to spend. Bob was next—he was the quiet one. He looked the most Spanish and his hair was wavy and as black as coal. He had eyes like a hawk—he could kill a bird with a single stone—and he wound up a champion darts player. He liked to walk over Hampstead Heath three or four times a day with his friend George Mead. George was long, like all his family, and he wound up about six foot seven. He had a lurcher that would tear other dogs to bits. He and Bob would set their dogs to fight other dogs up on the heath.

Me brother Jim was closest to me in age and we spent a lot of time together with Ruddy and our other mates. Lulu was the youngest and she was all up front. She was a spitfire and we was always fighting. Once I hit her round the ear’ole and she flew up the stairs after me and stabbed me in the arse with a pair of scissors. She always wanted me to give her money. I was one for saving and I always had a few coppers in me pocket. I don’t think she liked it cause gels couldn’t go scrounging and scrumping like boys could.

Like me brothers, I always wore a cap and I had no hair. Me dad would cut it with old horse clippers, right over except for the fringe—that was the style. I was bald headed all bar that fringe on the front, which stuck out under me cap. I wore a pair of the old man’s trousers, cut down, with braces to hold them up. When the old man finished with a pair of trousers he would give them to one of us boys. If it was my turn he would put them on the table and tell me to lay on them. ‘Up you go,’ he would say. Then he would chalk round me, cut round the outline and sew them up. They looked like nothing on earth—old corduroy trousers with two buttons either side of a flap. The length depended on how old and worn they was and how much the old man had to cut off them—they might be as much as knee deep. I never had a long pair of trousers. I wore a wool jersey on top in the winter and nothing in the summer, except a shirt when I was at school. I looked scruffy in me hand-me-downs, but you weren’t a boy unless yer arse was hanging out of yer trousers.

Me shoes was hobnail boots—leather boots with studs in the bottom of them. They was good leather and cost from three and a tanner up to seven and six from Davies’ on Upper Street. They had iron studs in the soles and made a row when you walked—it was no good trying to be a burglar with them on. The chimney sweep in our road was a shoe repairer when he weren’t out sweeping and he would mend yer shoes for a few pence a time. But Dad usually mended our boots. He would sit there all night with a mouthful of nails—bang, bang, bang—putting soles on our shoes. Sometimes he sewed them on with a big needle.

One morning me brother Jim showed his boot to the old man. ‘I’ve got a hole here, Dad.’

Me dad looked at the boot.

‘You’ve been hanging on the back of those bleeding carts again!’

‘No Dad, no Dad.’

But me father was furious. He aimed the boot and if it had hit Jim it would have killed him. He threw it that hard it went through the lath and plaster of the wall and into the next room.

Twelve o’clock was dinner time in our house. Most days I would come home from school and take me dad’s dinner out to where he was working. The food was held between two hot plates tied up in a handkerchief. When I turned round to go home he would always have some wood ready for me. ‘Here you are,’ he would say, ‘take it on for the fire.’ Coal was tenpence a hundredweight. So the old man would always say, ‘Don’t forget yer lump of wood if you want to sit round the fire.’ We always brought a lump of wood home, every one of us.

Me mum cooked on an old black range that had rings, an oven and a tap for hot water. Our dinner was mostly bread and dripping or bread and jam. Me mum would get a pennorth of fat from the butcher’s in a newspaper, take it home, put it on the hob and melt it down to make dripping. She knew how to make a penny do the work of a shilling and we always had something to eat in our house—but there weren’t too much of it. The only time she bought fruit was at Christmas. Then we each got a tangerine, an orange, an apple and sometimes a few nuts. The rest of the year all the fruit we got was what we went and nicked, mostly from the barrows in Junction Road.

There was barrows right the way along from Archway to Tufnell Park. We could walk by the stalls in Holloway Road and all we had to do was grab an apple here, next door an orange, next a bunch of bananas. When we was very young, me and Jim would follow courting couples to Hampstead Heath and when they threw an apple core down in the gutter—bang—we would dive after it, get hold of it and eat it. That was before we knew how to pinch what we wanted.

After school we was always out till it got dark, but during the winter evenings we stopped in the warm and sat round the kitchen range. Me sisters might be sewing and me dad might be reading a newspaper or Old Mother Shipton’s Almanac. If he ever read anything out loud me mum would say, ‘That’s a load of tommy rot.’

When the fire was nice and hot me mum would stick the poker in, get it red hot and put it in her jug of beer to warm it up. She didn’t drink a lot but she liked half a pint of stout in the evenings. Sometimes us kids bathed in a tin bath in front of the range. We normally had a bath once a week.

We liked to listen to our gramophone with the big old horn on it, and sometimes we played musical chairs using soap boxes as chairs. On Sunday evenings me dad might have three or four hands in playing cards or a game of dice, like crowns and anchors. Me mum would play the piano, funny little bits and pieces of things. She couldn’t read and write like me dad but she could play the piano. She taught Alice and Bill to play too and they took it up. Lots of people had pianos—you could pick them up second hand for five shillings.

There was plenty of pictures on the walls of our living room, of the family mostly—us kids and Mum and Dad. We took them with an old Brownie, and a bloke used to come round and take the pictures away and make them bigger. Up above the mantel was a big vase with a foot on the bottom and other ornaments that Mum kept. They was behind two velvet curtains that hung down off of brass rails. Sometimes she pulled the curtains back to show them off. Underneath was a big aspidistra plant and me mum kept the leaves shiny by wiping them with milk.

At night time, before we went to kip, we had a cup of broth to drink out of a tin enamel cup. Me mum kept a big saucepan on the go, full up with old bones and Gawd knows what else. She was always slinging in three pennorth of ‘pieces’ from the butcher—all the rough ends of the meat and bones. That big pot was always on the range.

Mum and Dad slept in the room off the kitchen on an old brass bed with a feather mattress. I shared a bed upstairs with Bob, Bill and Jim, and me sisters had the room next door. In the winter we would lay there under a grey army blanket with a hot brick wrapped in a scarf for our water bottle. Our pillow was a flour bag stuffed with straw. I would jiggle meself into a nice warm spot and try and get the biggest overcoat on top of me. Those old overcoats was on our backs during the day to keep us warm and on our bed at night.