The Long Journey Home

When I was growing up, my grandparents' life before they arrived in Britain was always a subject about which we just didn't speak. I'm not sure why we didn't speak about it, we just didn't, and nobody seemed too bothered about the fact that we didn't, especially my grandparents. So, it's taken me a long time to slowly piece together the tiny fragments of information into anything that makes any logical or chronological sense.

Although it wasn't something that I thought about very much as a child, I had always assumed that my grandfather was from Scotland, and my grandmother was from London............or maybe she was from Scotland too. I knew that my grandfather had a brother in Scotland, so he must be Scottish, and that my mother had been born in the East End of London, so I used the logic that you have as a child, added two and two together, and made four.

I can't really remember why, but when I was fourteen, my mother told me that my grandparents weren't Scottish or even English. They were Jewish and had come from Poland before 'The War'. We were exactly the same as everyone else around us, so this revelation didn't have much of an impact, and to be honest, I didn't really know what a Jew was. We didn't have Jews in my part of Essex. I knew from Sunday School that Jesus had been the King of the Jews, and that Anne Frank was a hidden Jew, and I knew that Jews has died in what we kids thought was called the Horror-Caused. But I didn't really see how that affected us because we were 'just the same as everyone else'. And my grandparents were 'just the same as everyone else' too. They looked the same, they spoke and dressed the same, they watched the same television programmes, and they only ever went to church for weddings and funerals, just like everyone else.

I started to become more interested in my family background thirteen years ago, when as part of a speech therapy study course, I was asked to write about the influences on my accent and the way that I spoke. It was really the first time I had thought about why my grandmother pronounced her 'd's and 't's in a funny flat way, why she said 'oy' and not 'Jesus' when she was surprised, and why we all said schlep instead of walk or run. I realised that the only reason I had never noticed these differences was that I just wasn't looking for them. And the more I found out, the more important it seemed to find out more.

My grandfather died of cancer almost five years ago at the age of ninety, having loved us all and guided us in the right direction for as long as I could remember. That was when I realised that with only my grandmother left, the last threads linking us to our Jewish past were about to snap. After almost seventy years married to my grandfather, during which they were only ever separated while he was away fighting during the war and she was giving birth to children, my grandmother's spirit visibly broke, and she changed almost overnight into a ghost of her former self. My grandparents had done absolutely everything together, and it seemed that like many couples who have been together for so long, she just didn't know how to exist without my grandfather at her side. She didn't know how to, and she didn't want to either. Since then, she has gradually been drifting away from us, and recently, we finally had to move her into a residential care home. With advancing dementia and rapidly failing health, it seems that her long journey home is almost over.

From Tough Stock

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.

Proudly Essex

It's amazing how much some people can remember about the early years of their childhood. I've always been slightly skeptical about the people who say 'I can remember being a baby as clearly as if it were yesterday'. Maybe their mothers just took more vitamins during pregnancy, or maybe their childhood was just more eventful and therefore worth remembering


Personally, I can just about remember yesterday as if it were yesterday. But then, I did grow up on one of the many council estates along the Thames estuary in Essex, the result of generations of good, solid, work-class inbreeding. I was probably related not-so-distantly to almost every other working-class family from Stepney to Tilbury, and from Romford down to the slimy shores of the estuary in Grays (with the exception of course of the small number of black or asian families brave enough at the time to venture into the post-war, Cockney heartlands). It would be a scientific miracle if we hadn't had at least a couple of wonky genes as a result, and a severe deficiency in something that wasn't abundant in either saturated animal fat, or Wall's Viennetta.


But hey, it was the Essex estuary, it was the 1970's. Some people still thought that the earth was flat and that if you didn't stop when you reached Southend, you simply fell off the edge of the world into a boiling vat of Spry Crisp n'Dry, one of the first 'designer' cooking oils (or 'chip fat' as it was commonly called).


Absolutely everybody thought that our council estates were somehow better than those in the rest of the country, especially those in Kent. Particularly Kent in fact, which was spoken of with the same curled lip and disdainful tone as we used when we spoke about 'The Germans'. Although the people from the council estates on the other side of the estuary in Kent weren't personally responsible for bombing our grandparents' East End two-up two-downs, they were guilty of a far greater crime....................they were almost exactly like us!.................only different!


Despite the fact that many of us couldn't actually find Essex on a map of Britain (or spell it for that matter),we had a crystal clear idea of who we were and where we came from. Our world was vast and tiny all at the same time. And seen through our eyes, we had everything we could possibly want or need.

Just a stone's throw north of the estuary out past Brentwood, we had rich green farmland with its woods and country parks. To be honest, we kids were the first ones to actually feel comfortable and really enjoy the countryside. It wasn't an obvious habitat for people like our parents who had grown up among the grey streets and bomb-craters of the post-war East End. Like rare species reared in captivity, I'm not sure most people actually knew what you were supposed to do with so much open space. There was too much of it to build a rockery, or a conservatory, and it wasn't flat enough to put down jumpers for goalposts and make a football pitch. There was even too much of it to build another council estate!


Then there were the glorious miles of stony, bottom-numbing beaches, their shoreline beautifully decorated with a vast and varied collection of plastic cups and bottles, string, plastic wrapping, and the other assorted shit which, like the people, could never bring itself to leave the estuary. So it just floated in and out year after year washing over the tar-stained pebbles and seagull carcasses. But because nobody else could see the glory of it, it had become our very own Costa del Sol, long before we discovered the real Costa del Sol and proceeded to pollute that as well. At the end of the estuary was Southend-On-Sea, the paint-peeling Saint Tropez of the Essex riviera, fish and chip capital of South Essex. It sat on the estuary, a shadow of its former Victorian, beach-resort self with a long promenade of benches which my parents called 'The Front'. My family would often drive down to Southend seafront early on a Sunday morning (going to church wasn't big in our community, two visits during your lifetime, and one at the end of it were considered sufficient) where my parents would march my sister and I along the seafront and back again with the incentive being that we could collect the pennies which people had dropped. I don't know why there were so many. It wasn't because we were all so rich that we didn't have a use for 'copper' (1/2, 1, and 2 pence coins), and it wasn't because we were generous either. But for whatever reason, those walks usually yielded enough for something nourishing like candy floss, or a toffee apple.

I grew up in a time before huge, out-of-town shopping centres like Lakeside had even been thought of. We spent our leisure shopping time, usually Saturday mornings, in the crowded, exotic souks of Romford and Basildon where you roasted in summer, got drenched in autumn, and froze in winter. The West End, or the 'Other End' as my family called it (being from the East End) was too far away, and too much trouble, for more than an annual visit at Christmas to see the windows of Selfridges. It was only 30 miles away, or half an hour on the train, but we had no need of it, you could find everything you wanted in the busy markets which could still be found in Grays, Romford, or Basildon. I remember there being what seemed like hundreds of market stalls in Romford selling everything the 1970's had to offer; from furry steering wheel covers for your Ford Capri, to twenty different types of seafood. Washing-up bowls in all the colours of the Essex rainbow, pick and mix, packs of big knickers, and cheap toys. You could spend hours being dragged around Romford Market with nothing but the promise of a 'wimpy' to keep you going.

I wouldn't say it was a sophisticated lifestyle, because it was actually quite the opposite. But looking back, it was simple and straighforward. We were working-class, our neighbours were working-class, and our friends were working-class. Kids made up games that only needed a brick, a piece of rope, and a cat, and everyone voted Labour......................and then along came aubergines and life was never the same!