LITMIR.BIZ

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on Upper Street. They had iron studs in the soles and made a row when you walked—it was no good trying to be a burglar with them on. The chimney sweep in our road was a shoe repairer when he weren’t out sweeping and he would mend yer shoes for a few pence a time. But Dad usually mended our boots. He would sit there all night with a mouthful of nails—bang, bang, bang—putting soles on our shoes. Sometimes he sewed them on with a big needle.

      One morning me brother Jim showed his boot to the old man. ‘I’ve got a hole here, Dad.’

      Me dad looked at the boot.

      ‘You’ve been hanging on the back of those bleeding carts again!’

      ‘No Dad, no Dad.’

      But me father was furious. He aimed the boot and if it had hit Jim it would have killed him. He threw it that hard it went through the lath and plaster of the wall and into the next room.

      Twelve o’clock was dinner time in our house. Most days I would come home from school and take me dad’s dinner out to where he was working. The food was held between two hot plates tied up in a handkerchief. When I turned round to go home he would always have some wood ready for me. ‘Here you are,’ he would say, ‘take it on for the fire.’ Coal was tenpence a hundredweight. So the old man would always say, ‘Don’t forget yer lump of wood if you want to sit round the fire.’ We always brought a lump of wood home, every one of us.

      Me mum cooked on an old black range that had rings, an oven and a tap for hot water. Our dinner was mostly bread and dripping or bread and jam. Me mum would get a pennorth of fat from the butcher’s in a newspaper, take it home, put it on the hob and melt it down to make dripping. She knew how to make a penny do the work of a shilling and we always had something to eat in our house—but there weren’t too much of it. The only time she bought fruit was at Christmas. Then we each got a tangerine, an orange, an apple and sometimes a few nuts. The rest of the year all the fruit we got was what we went and nicked, mostly from the barrows in Junction Road.

      There was barrows right the way along from Archway to Tufnell Park. We could walk by the stalls in Holloway Road and all we had to do was grab an apple here, next door an orange, next a bunch of bananas. When we was very young, me and Jim would follow courting couples to Hampstead Heath and when they threw an apple core down in the gutter—bang—we would dive after it, get hold of it and eat it. That was before we knew how to pinch what we wanted.

      After school we was always out till it got dark, but during the winter evenings we stopped in the warm and sat round the kitchen range. Me sisters might be sewing and me dad might be reading a newspaper or Old Mother Shipton’s Almanac. If he ever read anything out loud me mum would say, ‘That’s a load of tommy rot.’

      When the fire was nice and hot me mum would stick the poker in, get it red hot and put it in her jug of beer to warm it up. She didn’t drink a lot but she liked half a pint of stout in the evenings. Sometimes us kids bathed in a tin bath in front of the range. We normally had a bath once a week.

      We liked to listen to our gramophone with the big old horn on it, and sometimes we played musical chairs using soap boxes as chairs. On Sunday evenings me dad might have three or four hands in playing cards or a game of dice, like crowns and anchors. Me mum would play the piano, funny little bits and pieces of things. She couldn’t read and write like me dad but she could play the piano. She taught Alice and Bill to play too and they took it up. Lots of people had pianos—you could pick them up second hand for five shillings.

      There was plenty of pictures on the walls of our living room, of the family mostly—us kids and Mum and Dad. We took them with an old Brownie, and a bloke used to come round and take the pictures away and make them bigger. Up above the mantel was a big vase with a foot on the bottom and other ornaments that Mum kept. They was behind two velvet curtains that hung down off of brass rails. Sometimes she pulled the curtains back to show them off. Underneath was a big aspidistra plant and me mum kept the leaves shiny by wiping them with milk.

      At night time, before we went to kip, we had a cup of broth to drink out of a tin enamel cup. Me mum kept a big saucepan on the go, full up with old bones and Gawd knows what else. She was always slinging in three pennorth of ‘pieces’ from the butcher—all the rough ends of the meat and bones. That big pot was always on the range.

      Mum and Dad slept in the room off the kitchen on an old brass bed with a feather mattress. I shared a bed upstairs with Bob, Bill and Jim, and me sisters had the room next door. In the winter we would lay there under a grey army blanket with a hot brick wrapped in a scarf for our water bottle. Our pillow was a flour bag stuffed with straw. I would jiggle meself into a nice warm spot and try and get the biggest overcoat on top of me. Those old overcoats was on our backs during the day to keep us warm and on our bed at night.

       VII

      Winter was winter and summer was summer in them days. You knew when the snow was going to come, you knew when the winds was coming. In the winter we had snow and ice and it was very cold. In March we looked forward to terrific winds all the month. In the spring the sun come out, with all the lovely little flowers, and it got warmer and warmer. When the summer come you couldn’t walk on the pavements without shoes on it was that warm.

      Where I lived it was like being in the countryside. Once you left Highgate Road there was Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead Heath and The Spaniards. Just up the road was Waterlow Park and Highgate Wood. Waterlow was a beautiful park. There was a lot of keepers there—not just one or two, dozens of them, always planting out. On the Highgate Hill side, as you walked in the gate, there was a beautiful aviary with lots of lovely birds—blimey, it was a picture to look at. The times I tried to nick birds out of that aviary, but there was always someone about.

      All year, but specially in the summer holidays, I spent more time over Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Heath than anywhere else. As long as I come home for me food of a night time I could go out where I wanted. Kids of all ages went out all day long in the summer time. Me mum never seen me till it was time to go to bed at about ten o’clock. When it went dark we went to bed.

      There was two estates near us where we could roam about. Lady Burdett-Coutts had a big place hedged with trees where we would often set our bird nets. She sold some of her land for building Hollylodge Estate, where me father worked on and off for years. It was a private estate with very expensive houses and a bowler-hatted gatekeeper who always knew everyone and who was in or out. That was where me sister Alice went into service.

      The other big place was Kenwood House, which had a fence right the way round it—it must have had two or three miles of fencing. I would like as many pennies as I was in there. We would creep in to fish in the pond with cotton reels and worms stuck on pins till we was spied by one of the gamekeepers. The wood had lots of lovely birds in it—songbirds, pheasants, you name it.

      When I was still at school they opened the house and estate to the public. Our school went to the opening and sang for the King who come to plant an oak tree. There was a big crowd there. It was a hot day and after the singing I ran home, bought some lemonade crystals, mixed them up with water, went back to Kenwood and sold lemonade for a penny a cup. After Kenwood was opened we often went inside the house to look at the rooms and the big pictures. It was free to get in.

      Me dad was never sober when we was kids, but he was a proper father. He showed us where to go scrumping, where to go bird catching, where to go fishing. We collected walnuts in the season and pickled them. We made horseradish sauce by digging down deep for the root, grating it and mixing it with vinegar. We always had a pocket of beech nuts or cob nuts in the autumn. We made elderflower wine in spring and we made beez wine all year round. Dad bought the beez from the chemist shop at the bottom of our road. It looked like popcorn. We would put thruppence worth of these grains in water with sugar and watch them slowly sink to the bottom. After three months we would fish them out and it was ready to drink.

      Me father had a ferret and he taught us how to catch rabbits in snares and we sold them for a bob each. We would go round with six on a stick

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