London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City

I says to Ruddy, ‘There’s some nice tomatoes there. We’ll have a few of them.’

‘Righto, Cabby,’ he says.

They never locked the greenhouses so we just opened the door and went in. When we was inside I seen something fluttering out of the corner of me eye. It was a little wren trying to get out. Then I seen a double-barrelled gun lying on the bench. I picked it up, pulled the trigger and blew every bleeding pane of glass out the place—bang! Ruddy thought he was a dead’un, I think. The wren either flew away or got killed. Poor little bugger—they’re only as big as a sixpence. I don’t know what made me do it—I never even knew the gun was loaded. I just picked it up and pulled the trigger.

When we wasn’t wandering round we might play football or go running on the cinder track on the heath. Or we might have a day out and walk to Hadleigh Wood, not far from Barnet, to watch the trains go by on the railway line. As they went past we would stand there in a bleeding big cloud of smoke and steam. Me mum always used to say, ‘That smoke does you the world of good, breathe it in.’

We also liked to go to London Zoo. There was a canal along one side of the zoo and there was always loads of kids up on the bridge, diving into the water after pennies and ha’pennies thrown in by people passing by. They did it to see us dive and then they would stand and laugh. In we would go and scrabble round in the dirt to find those coppers. Nine times out of ten I went in nude, but sometimes I wore a pair of lady’s drawers tied with a drawstring at the knee.

On one trip I was with Cocker.

He says to me, ‘C’mon, Cabby, let’s go in the zoo and look round.’

‘Alright,’ I says.

So we swam over the canal and bunked into the zoo. It was a hot day so we soon dried off. We headed straight for the monkey house. We liked watching the old monkeys racing up and down and swinging on ropes. They was lads, the monkeys—always up to something. We bought some peanuts for a penny and fed them through the bars. Then we went up to the lion house and after that to see the elephants. We never did have a ride on an elephant—it was too dear.

On the way back from the elephants we passed some parrots.

‘Hang on, Sid,’ says Cocker.

He was looking at the beautiful coloured parrots and he gave them some peanuts. Then he reached over and grabbed one of them. The old parrot squawked but in a second Cocker had it stuffed inside his jersey. We walked straight out the gates with it. A few hours later we come across a bloke called Bridges who was a penny bookmaker.

‘Do you want to buy a parrot?’ says Cocker.

‘What kind of parrot is it?’ says Bridges.

‘Here he is—show him, George,’ I says.

Cocker got the parrot out and it started hollering and hooting.

‘I’ll give you two bob for it,’ says Bridges.

‘C’mon then, let’s have yer money,’ I says.

At six o’clock at night we was always home for tea. The two-handled pan would be on the hob full of hot broth. I might have that and a lump of bread and dripping. Some-times me mum made bread pudding or rice pudding. She was an excellent cook and it was said that she once worked as a cook in the palace. There weren’t anyone in the world that could cook a rice pudding like me mum. She often said about me, ‘He would sooner have a basin of rice pudding than anything else!’ An hour later we would be back on the heath till dark.

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There was something to do on the heath all year round. In the winter there was ice skating and tobogganing. We would go on the building sites and nick some quartering and some boarding, then take it all home and make sledges out of it. We used the steel lathes from old beds for the runners. Then, when the snow come along we would drag them all up the heath and let them out at sixpence for a half hour. Every day me, Ruddy, Joey and Cocker would be up there taking the money or sledging ourselves. The run went from the top of the hill to the bottom by the bandstand.

When the ponds froze up and they give the all clear to skate, plenty of people would be over there. We hung round the ponds and nicked their skates when they wasn’t looking and then we either sold them or let them out. I couldn’t skate though, not even roller skate.

In the summer we would all swim. We taught ourselves to swim, just jumped in and splashed about till we could do it. There was three ponds. The first one weren’t good for swimming really as it was full of leeches, but we took no notice, just brushed them off. Fishing weren’t allowed there but we did it anyway, and we caught roach, carp and bream. We caught them with blood worms that we fished out of the compost in the cemetery. We caught rats too by baiting the hook with food. When we caught them we held them up and killed them with a stick. Sometimes I would take a whole clutch of ducklings from the pond and rear them at home. We would even catch swans for a bit of devilment and move them onto another pond. We took their eggs for eating, but only one from each clutch cause they was a nice looking bird.

The second pond was mainly for boating and fishing. People would take their little boats there and dogs was allowed to swim there too. Right opposite was the iron well. The water welled up red from the ground and filled up the pond. We often stopped to drink the red water. People would bring cans and bottles to fill up cause the water was good for you. They come from all over for that water.

Me father first took me to the iron well when I had sticky, sore eyes. He would bathe them and then say, ‘Now drink some.’ Dad was a clever old boy—he knew a lot about healing and was a popular man. There was always someone coming round saying, ‘Bill, have you got this? Bill, what do you make of that?’ He had a lot to do with horses in the war so people would sometimes come up and say, ‘Bill, will you come up and see to the old horse, he’s got the mange?’ For mange he used sulphur sticks ground down to powder, mixed with a block of lard and then rubbed into the horse’s coat. He always put a stick of sulphur in the dogs’ water too.

The third pond was the swimming pond. It was for men and boys all week, except for Wednesdays when women could swim there. The swimmers got undressed in a fenced-off bit with partitions. We would watch them come in, see what sort of clothes they had on and follow them when they went out to jump in the water. As soon as they jumped in, back we went and rifled their clothes. If they was better than our’n we nicked them and left our old ones there for them. When I got home me mum would say, ‘Where d’you get that from?’ ‘Off of the rag and bone man,’ I would reply.

There was a concrete diving board at the swimming pond that was about thirty-three foot high. It was the first Olympic diving board. They come from all over the globe to dive from there into fifteen foot of water. One summer night we was up there fishing at two or three o’clock in the morning. We always took a big old umbrella fishing in case it rained. I picked it up.

‘Watch this,’ I says.

I climbed up to the top of the board and jumped off with the umbrella as a parachute. Then all me mates had to do it too.

Over by Jack Straw’s Castle was more ponds—the Leg of Mutton Pond and Whitestone Pond. Whitestone was a man-made pond made out of white stone with a little wall either side. It was used as a drive through for horse and carts—anything that was pulled by a horse. The horses would go through during hot weather. As they got in deeper the water covered the hubs of the wheels. It got into all the cracks and the wood swelled. That stopped the dried-out old wheels from sounding so creaky.

I sometimes took Babs over Parliament Hill Fields first thing in the morning on me own. I always let the dog have a swim when we was over there. One morning, as we got near to the first pond, I seen what I thought was a football about twenty or thirty foot out from the edge. I threw a piece of wood in so Babs would go in and get the ball. As she got near, she went to try and grab it, like a dog would do. Then I seen it was a bowler hat. The hat went down and come up again and I seen a face. It was a man, drownded hisself. I thought to meself, ‘Blimey, the poor sod’s dead.’ He must have been in there some time cause you don’t float till after so many hours or days.

I went and found a keeper and told him there was a dead bloke in the pond. He come down and had a look then went to the swimming pond run by the head keeper. They got a punt, carried it up to where the man was, put it in the water, punted out and dragged the body in. After a while the other keepers come round and they covered the body over with a black tarpaulin. Then the police arrived with a basket trolley—a basket about six foot long on wheels that was used as a stretcher. They put the bloke on it and took him away.

Me and Babs watched the whole show but they never asked me a thing, not even me name and address. I never knew what had happened to the man. All I ever knew about him was that he would have had a good job, like in a bank. You knew what people did by the hats they wore. A butcher, a salesman or a grocer wore a straw hat. A builder wore a soft cap. Anybody of any breeding wore a trilby hat. But blokes with jobs in offices and banks, like the one in the pond, wore a bowler hat with a pinstripe suit and they always carried an umbrella.

I seen several others pulled out of the swimming pond dead. As well as the diving board, the swimming pond had two rafts in the middle what you could get up on and dive into the water. Some people went to go over there thinking they could swim when they couldn’t. The keepers had a long pole with three hooks on the bottom and they used this to fish out anyone who went under. Several times I seen the keeper go out in the punt and haul a dead person out of the drink.

Women could only swim on a Wednesday till a pond inside the grounds of Kenwood was opened for women only. We would go there and watch the gels swimming. We couldn’t get too near to them but had to stay about fifteen or twenty yards away. They soon had a diving board there too, made of scaffle boards and poles. A bloke called Captain Webb arranged for it to be built for them. Captain Webb lived in a great house up West Hill at the end of Lady Burdett-Coutts’ estate. He was more or less like the Prince of Wales as he was very important and well known for being charitable.

The other thing we liked doing was a bit of horse riding. The people who owned Kenwood let the Express Dairies put their horses in the field to graze and have a rest, like. Sometimes they was out there for a week or—if it was a poor old horse—a month. They was pretty tame and we would climb over the fence with an old scaffle cord, creep up to the horse, put the rope in his mouth, jump on his back and fly round the field. The old gamekeepers would come after us and fire a gun to frighten us off. We would ride up to the fence as far as we could and leap over—once we was over the other side we was home and dry.

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Every summer there was an outing for all the women. They went from the Bay to Southend. That was their day out. Practically all the mums, aunts and grandmothers went. They went on a double-decker charabanc with four horses and a driver. The coach was belt driven. It had no springs and solid rubber wheels with iron studs banged in, so they was iron tyres more or less. The poor old horses dragged this forty miles to the seaside and back the same day. They stopped off at about four pubs on the way.

All the kids crowded round the coach before it went away, waving and singing, and the old gels would throw a handful of ha’pennies or pennies out. We all scrambled for these before they left. While we waved, the horses clopped away up the street on the cobblestones. Then up by Raydon Street the noise was muffled when their hooves hit the straw. There was a bloke up there, name of Bill Duggin, who had an illness what meant he mustn’t hear any row. So there was a load of straw in the road round and about his house, from Buckingham’s shop right down to the cemetery. What he had I do not know, but straw was often put on the road when people was ill. If someone in the street had scarlet fever or some very bad illness they would cover the street from end to end with straw so that when the horses come down they wouldn’t bother them.

When the women had gone we would spend our money on sweets or ice cream. In the summer there was an ice cream pitch right outside our house. The bloke had a barrow and a churn and the ice cream was a penny, while a cup of ice and half a lemon was a ha’penny. There was a bloke selling toffee apples too. If you was lucky you got the one with the thruppenny bit stuck inside.

Sometimes we spent our money on going to the pictures. It cost thruppence and there was two sittings of a night time and a matinee in the afternoon. In the evening they had two pictures—they showed you one, then a five-minute rest, then the other one. A pianist played the piano behind the curtain. I couldn’t read the captions so I just used me imagination. Before the film come on we would have a competition for the best call-out and everyone would start up. I liked to shout, ‘Bob each, wild rabbits,’ as loud as I could.

Not long after the women’s outing us kids would go away. We went hop picking in Kent for a month every summer. We really looked forward to it. First time I went there I thought I was in no man’s land. We slept in a pigsty full of straw and picked hops from dawn to dusk. We didn’t really work hard, but every day we filled huge sacks with hops. We worked with some travellers who went from farm to farm picking what was in season. I went with me brothers, Ruddy, Cocker, Joey and a lorry load of other boys. A few gels come too, but not many—most wasn’t allowed.

The hop picking trip was organised by Old Mother Ring. She was the moneylender for the poor in the Bay. The most you could borrow was a half crown and you paid back a penny in the shilling each week. You had to be at least sixteen to borrow money. Her old man was in the building game and she had a son called Mickey who we called ‘snotty nose’—dirty sod he was. She paid us three and a tanner a week and cooked for us. We kept some of our wages and gave some to our mothers when we got back.

After work we bathed and swam in the river, and in the evenings Mother Ring made a big pot of broth with bones and rabbit so we had plenty to eat. We carried on scrumping and thieving and Gawd knows what else when we got the chance. It weren’t long before we got lousy there and as soon as we got home out come the horse clippers and the red carbolic soap and off come our hair.

We was back in time for Barnet Fair when the gypsies arrived in London. It went on for seven days and seven nights. We was up there most of the time. I worked on the kiddies’ roundabout, turning the wheel—I think it was a penny to go round. I would watch the old gel who owned it and when she weren’t looking, nick a handful of coppers. Sometimes we took some poles and canvas up there and dug a hole for a toilet. Then we would stand by the screen and as people passed by we would cry out, ‘Penny-a-piddle-or-a-poop!’