Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood by Jacky Hyams

Author:Jacky Hyams [Hyams, Jacky]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Europe, World War II, Social Science, London (England), Travel, General, Customs & Traditions, Great Britain, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 9781843583523
Google: ke5SYgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1843583526
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

Throughout the fifties, our little home started to change. Our flat began to show the material evidence of what was happening outside – the country’s slowly emerging consumerism. My mum wasn’t especially house-proud, aspiring to a comfortable and carefully thought out home. She just went out and bought whatever big item we needed after my dad had handed over the money. First came the seventeen-inch TV set from Bardens on Kingsland High Street, bought on hire purchase. Each week she would march down to Bardens and pay off the l6/6d (sixteen shillings and sixpence) weekly payment, spread over two years. My dad could have easily handed over cash for the set, around £70, then. But he liked the idea of the new HP; it appealed to his sense of ‘have it now, pay up later’. And so my mum was able to replace the somewhat shabby utility post-war furnishings in our flat with brand new furniture: a three-piece moquette lounge suite, at £40 (just seven shillings and nine pence a week), and, for their bedroom, a £60 walnut mahogany bedroom suite at eleven shillings a week from Davants down the road, as well as a new dark-green fitted carpet to cover the grim and ancient lino in the hall and living room. For some reason, probably because they didn’t have a clue about hiring a decent local fitter to lay a brand new carpet – they certainly couldn’t do it themselves – the carpet was poorly fitted. And it remained as it was. Getting value for money or a good job done didn’t figure with either of my parents. You paid. And if you got a bad job, you shrugged and lived with it. It wasn’t that important.

We acquired a fridge from the local North Thames Gas Board showroom, also on the ‘never-never’ (long-term credit), another eight bob (eight shillings) a week. The fridge was a tiny box by today’s standards but it worked. Processed cheese squares wrapped in silver paper, nestling in their little round box are an early memory of what we kept inside our first fridge. And, of course, the new frozen foods – things like peas and fish fingers were popped into the tiny freezer section at the top.

The TV, however, was a technical disaster. Getting it to work needed considerable patience. The picture was often fuzzy and, no matter what you did with the indoor aerial, there were frustrating nights trying to get it to work properly if you wanted to watch programmes like What’s My Line? (I was somewhat fascinated by a rather rude man called Gilbert Harding, a permanent fixture on the show, perhaps because his big glasses reminded me of The Old Man) or even the puppet Muffin the Mule (which I thought was silly; I wasn’t a kid for puppets or even dolls).

Often, we’d wind up peering at the screen, trying to watch a programme while horizontal lines ran right across the set or there was some other form of major interference.

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