大象传媒

My Mum and Dad met when they were just 14 years old on a Council estate in Essex. Both their families were from the East End of London and had gratefully moved out to the shiny new estate after the war ended. Neither Mum or Dad were alive then, and all they ever knew was the peace and serentity of their lovely new houses and the green Essex fields around them. Most of them have more new houses built on them now, but I always loved trying to imagine how it used to look in Dad's stories about how he could run all the way from the railway station to his house in 5 minutes flat, the as-the-crow-flies route that is now home to a few hundred or so more families in more new houses. Or how they used to play all day in the cornflower fields up towards the edge of the forest, also buried now under the sprawl of suburbia. I remember Nan telling stories as well, although hers were always about the war. Especially the one about their house getting bombed whilst my Auntie Pat was still a little girl. Apparently most of the building came down, their old Victorian terrace in Bow battered by the continuous barrage of German bombs. All that was left was the bare staircase reaching up into emptiness, the cold sky still thick with rubble-dust. My Nan said she screamed when she saw through the gloom my baby Aunt still perched atop them, all alone up there swaying in the wind. They got her down OK and she wasn't hurt, but my Aunt has stuttered ever since. Some bits of that East End war legacy never did go away.

Both Mum and Dad had proper East End-size families too - 3 siblings each. Mum had an older brother, and two much older sisters. So that made her a bit of an after-thought I guess. Nan used to say she was the result of a coal shortage, which used to make me feel sad for her and a bit protective, although Mum said she never minded that Nan said that. Her Dad died when she was just six years old, probably a complication from a wartime illness they reckoned. He was a searchlight operator, trying to pick out the German bombers from the blacked-out night sky so that we could shoot them down before they did their damage to our houses, factories and shops. I was always surprised he made it through the war at all to be honest, once I found out what job he'd done. It must have felt like being a sitting duck, being stuck up there all on your own at the end of the only beam of light for miles around.

So anyway, I never did get to meet my Grandad Moss - although we did visit him at the cemetery almost every Sunday morning for my entire childhood. Mum never talked much about growing up in that post-war period without a Dad - she never has liked to draw attention to herself or give the impression that she felt hard done by. She says she was luckier than some and that they always had enough to get by on. The truth is though that my Nan struggled continuously to keep her little family together after my Grandad died. Apparently his family didn't want to know, so Nan worked every hour God sent in the laundry of a big Insurance company up in Holborn. And as all of her brothers and sisters were off out at work by the time she was at school, Mum was one of the original latch-key kids. I never minded hearing how she used to have to come home from school and light the fire as no-one else was home, or how the boy next door made her a bicycle of bits they'd scavenged because she couldn't afford a proper one. No, what used to really make me ache inside for her was when I'd hear how Dad used to go to her school open evenings at 15 years of age, as her Mum was always still at work, or how she'd have to borrow a proper school shirt from her best friend when she was picked to sing in the school choir, as her tie never sat quite right with her own home-made ones. And the worse one was how a friend of my Nan's asked one night on the train home if she was proud of her Jacqui being picked for the lead in that year's school production of Roger and Hammerstein's HMS Pinafore. Nan hadn't even known she was in it.
'I just didn't think to tell her'
my Mum had said
'there wasn't anything in it, I just knew she'd still be at work and wouldn't be able to come.'

There was never a hint of pity in Mum's recollections - in fact most of them Dad let slip at various points. Mum'd probably have been happier never mentioning it to anyone, she was that kind of woman. For me, it made me feel things I could barely decsribe, even when younger. That fierce love that only children feel, protectiveness, and a huge desire to go back and change it all for her if I could have - to make it all alright, to give her the childhood she'd given me where everything you did - however small and insignificant - was treated as the most amazing thing that anyone had ever done, anywhere.

It's amazing what people - you're own family - go through and cope with. That indomitable East End spirit is alive and well in my family at least. Lest we forget what our Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Mums and Dads have all experienced before we were born. So much we could - and should - learn from them.

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