大象传媒

My name is Martin Kirby.I am a 61 year old retired primary school headteacher and I live in Nottingham.
I was born on 17-5-44 in Hitchen,Herts but was brought up in the post-war bombed sites in Stepney.My family(mum was Lucy,dad was Ted,older sister Hetty,younger sister Gillian)lived at 37 Planet Street.To the east the next street was Winterton Street which was completely destroyed in the 1940 bombing,as was nearby Watney Street market.These ruins were my playground.You could climb up the airtowers over the Shoreditch to Shadwell Metropolitan underground line and watch the trains thunder by.
In these ruins(some quite dangerous) we played many games-tin can copper,run outs etc.I had a Dinky collection and a friend had a vast Dinky army collection and we played "wars" in the weeds of the ruins.It was great fun!
At the bottom of the site of Winterton Street was a permanently flooded air raid shelter which stank to high heaven.We never played in there.
My parents married in 1939.Ted Kirby was born in 1909 in Cable Street and Lucy Martin was born in 1907 in Planet Street.

My father was a cabinet maker and in 1939 he got a job working for the British Oxygen Company in Hackney.As this was an essential industry he was exempted war service.He lived in Stepney throughout the war and told me many terrible stories from the 1940 air raids over the Commercial Road and the silent strikes of 1945.He was a volunteer fire fighter.A communist and a materialist,he once told me how he rescued a priest from a burning church thus saving his life.He also told me about his first months at school in 1915.He attended Nicholas Gibson in The Highway.I vividly remember one sentence
of his-"Not a day went by without the headmaster,in the daily assembly,announcing the death of one of our kids' dads at the front..." (such was the scale of the butchery...).
My mum Lucy was a dressmaker & machinist and a Sunday School teacher,and later became,like my father,an active communist.She had eight brothers and sisters.Her favourite was the eldest,Harry Martin,a bachelor and a London docker.He was killed at work in 1940 by a German bomb.My grandma was shopping in Watney Street when news of his death was received from a policeman by my mum at home in 37 Planet Street.Word quickly spread in the little street.In those days people sat on chairs outside their open front doors,gossiping,chatting,reading or just watching the children play.
When nan walked down the street(from the top end,Commercial Road)carrying her shopping,all the people sitting outside quietly got up as she passed by and went inside.She knew something terrible had happened.When she got to number 37 my mum told her that her eldest son,Harry,had been killed.Nan died on my first birthday,17th May 1945.I never knew her.
A neighbour in Planet Street was a violent man.Legend had it that he killed someone in a brawl in 1915 and was sent abroad by his family for a few years.He was a thief and a loaded(ie crooked)dice maker-some of his clients were policemen from Scotland Yard.His proud boast was that in a black-out he burgled the then unoccupied Mayfair flat of the famous film star Jack Buchannan.He stole his 78rpm record collection.I was never told what he did with them.I suspect he sold them on the black market.

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