My parents were 'war-babies' from working-class families in the East End of London. My mother was born in Stepney, and my father in Plaistow. They were born during the Second World War, at a time when the rich were fretting about the dwindling stocks in their wine cellars, the middle-classes were tightening their belts and worrying about their front lawns, and the poor...............................well, the poor were even poorer than ever.I'm not suggesting that the war wasn't difficult for everyone, of course it was. The trauma of staring at half-empty shelves of St Emilion must have haunted the aristocracy for years after the end of the war. And the lack of genuine Belgian lace available for dress-makers probably left permanent mental scars on a whole generation of posh debutantes forced to 'come-out' in a dress that wasn't 'absolutely dripping' in 'oodles of simply divine lace'. Even the poor (and still considered at the time, semi-divine), hard-hit, royal family were forced to think seriously about their Champagne consumption, although thinking seriously was probably about as close as they came to actually being hard-hit at all. Well, apart from the small bomb that landed on Buckingham Palace knocking almost all the buds off of several azaleas and causing one of the dogs to pee on the hearth-rug. The poor Queen-Mother was probably still thinking of those azalea bushes as she tip-toed through street after street of bomb-flattened East End homes, tut-tutting, and smiling sweetly at people who had just lost absolutely everything in last-night's bombing raid. She must have been worrying herself sick about how she was going to pay the rent, and what she was going to put on the table for the kids' tea as, like a 1940s Marie Antoinette, she uttered that immortal phrase 'Now I can look the East End in the face'. But, of course, they were different times and the East End working classes 'knew their place'. In the same way that nowadays, celebrities like Madonna can buy children in developing countries and not call it people-trafficking, the aristocracy in war-time Britain could tuck into four-course meals and still consider themselves 'hard-hit'.
But in some ways though, I think the working-class poor, like my parent's families, found it easier than others to get through the war. Years of social evolution had made them as hard as old nails, and genetically capable of coping with just about anything that life could throw at them, including German bombs. It seemed that, like viruses or rats, the tougher life was, the stronger they grew. They were tough and resilient, could (and did) eat just about anything, animal, vegetable, or mineral, and had the mental and physical resilience to survive in an environment that would horrify, and almost certainly kill people of my generation.
Although he was most definitely present for the conception, my grandfather was away fighting for his country by the time my mother came into the world, followed a couple of years later by my uncle. My mother was born on 15th December 1940, and hit the ground running slap-bang in the middle of the London Blitz. For anyone who, unlike me, wasn't brought up on war stories or just has no interest in the war, this was the name given to a period of particularly heavy and sustained bombing. It began on 7th September 1940 and lasted until 10th May 1941. Fifty-seven consecutive nights of intensive bombing raids, over 20,000 civilian victims (a majority in east and south-east London), and a million homes damaged or destroyed in London alone.So it was my 'tough as old nails' grandmother who had sole responsibility for dodging the bombs and ensuring that my mother and her brother reached adulthood, or at least adolescence, in one piece. It was my strong, resourceful grandmother who queued for food for hours with hundreds of other women, even though there was no guarantee of finding anything remotely edible, even by wartime standards, when you finally reached the front.
By 1940, just about everything except fresh air was rationed, and even that was in short supply in the densely-populated streets of east London. Every lungful came ready-mixed with a combination of dirt, chimney-smoke, and toxic factory fumes. Prior to the war, Britian had imported about 55 million tons of food, but as a result of the blockade by German U-boats, this had dropped to almost nothing by 1940. Rationing was supposed to ensure that everyone received a fair share of the limited food that could be produced on a small, chilly, wet island like Britain. But the reality was that it had the greatest impact on the poor, inner-city, working classes. The rich, and even the middle-classes, could afford to supplement their rations from the black market. People living in rural areas could illicitly grow food and keep animals to keep the wolf from the door. But what did you do if you lived in a crowded inner-city community where the only things which grew freely were the lice and the food queues. The answer was simple, you either starved, or you 'got creative'. My mother was seven years old before she actually knew what a banana looked like with its skin. Up until then, my grandmother would boil parsnips and then mash them with some banana essence. Having never seen a real one, my mother didn't know the difference. Although it wasn't actually rationed, the sea blockade meant that the only fruit that might be seen in shops were home-grown varieties, and even then this depended on supply and on whether you could afford what there was. So, with the exception of root vegetables and the occasional Granny Smith apple, fresh 'fruit and veg' were a rarity. Greengrocers weren't particuarly green-looking, and for East End kids, anything remotely healthy like spinach or tomatoes were as rare as hens' teeth or rocking-horse shit. The idea of five portions of fruit and vegetables per day would have been as remote at the time as the possibility of putting a man on the moon.My mother is still able to horrify me with stories of how they lived on things that nowadays we wouldn't feed to starving battery hens let alone humans. Pigs' feet, cow's stomachs, hearts and lungs and brains, and an assortment of things that are only seen on organ transplant lists in Britain today. But if you were hungry and you wanted to survive, and you were given a slice of bread spread with a tiny amount of rendered animal fat, you ate it, and in some cases came to actually enjoy it.
Just about everything that we make 'with' something in modern times, was made 'without' it by families like my mother's during the war. Meatless roasts, butterless (and sometimes breadless) bread and butter pudding, fruitless bananas, and coffee-less coffee. Each dish was made up of 10% actual food, and 90% imagination. But this was like water off a duckless duck's back for the tough people of the East End.
It's reassuring to know that, even though I may not be used to such a hard existence, I have the same blood in my veins, and I'm proud to come from such tough stock.
