London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City - Sidney Day

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would whip off their shirts and fight like tigers. There would be blood and snot everywhere. Me dad loved a good fight. That evening they would be drinking together in the pub.

      The pubs was always full up with hounds gambling. Me brother Bill worked as runner to a penny bookmaker. He collected the bets and took them in. Sometimes the police would come into the pub and he had to give them five bob beer money. The police looked forward to it—that’s all they went in for, to cop their money off of the bookmakers or the gamblers. On one occasion two plainclothes policemen—two real bastards—come into the Brookfield.

      They says to me brother, ‘Come on, cough up.’

      He emptied his pockets and they went out and round to the saloon bar. Then in come the Inspector and nicked Bill just the same. He got a thirty bob fine.

      The elder ones in the Bay was mostly always drunk. They liked a pint of black beer—the cheapest beer you could buy. A pint of black was five pence and other beer was sixpence a pint. The old biddies liked a drop of biddy wine. It was wine from the bottom of the barrel and it was thick like mud. The old gels would take their bottles into the pub and get three pennorth of it. It was the cheapest form of drink to get drunk on quick—it would blow yer hat off. It was also the favourite drink of worn-out prostitutes. Nearly everyone liked a drop to drink, and plenty drank theirselves to death.

      When someone died in our street the family would go in the pub with the collection. They wore black armbands. Everyone would throw in a few coppers, thruppence, sixpence—or whatever—for the family. Most people had a parish funeral cause their families couldn’t afford to pay for a proper one. A proper funeral cost six pounds and it was a big event, everybody turned out. They paraded the coffin through the streets covered in flowers. The glass-sided hearse was pulled by black horses with beautiful plumes sticking right up. They was stabled at the top of our street. The horses’ hooves would be muffled by straw put on the road to stop the noise and everyone would come outside and watch them go by.

      Me gran died when I was still very young. I don’t remember her having a funeral but she must have done. The day she died me mum was sitting down with me sisters when I come indoors.

      ‘Yer granny’s dead,’ she says.

      ‘Well it won’t burn yer lips to kiss her arse then, will it!’ I says, quick as anything.

      It just come out. Didn’t she give me a tanning. I was the youngest son and a bit of a favourite with me mum, but that time I think I really upset her. I suppose I thought nothing of death then. People was always dying or getting born.

       IV

      Everybody thought the world of me mum. Everybody in the Bay who had children, me mum brought them into the world. I don’t know what people said about the rest of us cause we was always up to villainry, always. But compared to the others in the street we was pretty prim and proper, our family. We wasn’t dirty and scruffy. Oh blimey, some never washed for bleeding weeks in the Bay.

      Me mum always wore a black dress with a potato sack taped round her as an apron. She was always cooking or round the wash pot. She worked from about six in the morning till she went to bed, doing housework and washing and ironing. She did all the washing for the Booths as well as bringing them into the world. More or less anything wanted doing it was, ‘Go and see Dinah, she’ll do it.’

      She would stand for hours at the copper in the scullery with a big white bar of Lifebuoy soap, rubbing and squeezing the clothes. We helped her by keeping the old copper going. We chopped wood to feed the fire and sometimes we burned old lino. The copper used to boil lovely when you put that on. Lots of houses had green or red lino made of tar, and it was thrown out when it got too cracked. When somebody burned lino the smoke outside was thick and black.

      We took turns putting the clean clothes and linen through the old iron wringer. Then Mum emptied the copper of all the water. At Christmas time we boiled the ham and the potatoes in that copper cause there was so many of us to feed. Every year me mum also used it to steam eight Christmas puddings and we usually ate the last one at Easter.

      Me mum was the pawn shop runner for the whole street. She got so much in the shilling off people to take their stuff to and from the pawn shop, or ‘Uncle Bill’s’ as all pawn shops was known. All of us was in the same boat as far as money was concerned. Two pound twelve and sixpence a week was an average wage. We had to pay everything out of that—food, clothing and health insurance. In the building game there was no such thing as a regular job. The money never lasted the week so most families got by with the help of the pawn shop.

      ‘Uncle Bill’ took in people’s valuables and clothes and charged a penny in the shilling when they bought them back. Every Monday morning me mum would do up her hair in earmuffs, put on her bonnet, tie the ribbons underneath and get out the old Bassinette pram. She would take me dad’s waistcoat and war medals, put them in the pram, and set off for the pawn shop on the corner of Tufnell Park, by the tube.

      As she went along the street people hollered out to her, ‘Take this for me Day-o,’ and she would pile everything into the pram. She took it in Monday, pawned it for the week, and then brought it back on Saturday. Going down Dartmouth Park Hill on a Monday with all the stuff was alright, but coming back up on a Saturday was a push—it was terrible. The pram was loaded right up high with parcels and it near took her all bleeding day.

      We took it in turns to go with Mum to the pawn shop and help her push the pram. We would pass lots of other people on the streets, and cattle, pigs and flocks of sheep on their way to London Caledonian Market.

      When we got to the shop she would go into a cubicle. The shop was divided into cubicles so nobody could see what you had to pawn. We stood and waited for ‘Uncle Bill’ to fill out the tickets. Then it was home, back up that hill. Me poor mum, what with that and all the washing, ironing and cooking, she was worn out before she died, poor old sod.

       V

      I got up every morning before six o’clock when me dad hollered up the stairs, ‘Get out of kip!’ I had a cold water wash in the washhouse, scrubbed meself with carbolic soap and then had a cup of tea. I might do the bread run—nine times out of ten we bought stale bread. Me mum would give me her pillowcase and I would take it up to the shop and get it filled for sixpence. When I got back I would have some bread—and jam too, if I could. Then I would get Ruddy out of the coal cellar or find one of me other mates.

      There was always people in the street, even early in the morning, sitting on their steps like blackbirds. It was good to get outside and away from the bugs indoors. The bugs was constantly eating away the mortar and the wood. A lot of houses never had wallpaper, only matchboarding painted with green or white limewash. Millions of bugs lived behind that matchboard. Sometimes when me and me brother Jim spotted them we would pick one each going up the wall and have a race. Me mum was always buying stuff to put round the iron bed to try and get rid of them. They sucked yer blood, they would bite terrible and they stank when you squashed them.

      One morning, early, I met up with Joey Booth, the youngest of the Booth boys, who was the same age as me. He was pulling our four-wheel cart. It had a plank of wood for a swivel axle, two big pram wheels at the back and two smaller wheels at the front. A lump of rope was the steering wheel.

      ‘Let’s take the cart out before we have to go to school, Cabby,’ he says.

       ‘Alright,’ I says.

      Everyone called me Cabby cause I spent a lot of time outside the station carrying people’s bags to the cabs for a few pennies. As soon as I see a woman come out with some big cases I would run up and say, ‘Do you want a cab, ma’am?’ and she would say, ‘Yes, please.’ Then I would take the cases over to the cab rank in the middle of St John’s Road.

      Joey and I took turns on the cart: one of us pushed

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