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accepting illegal bets probably seemed like a soft option when you take into account what so many in the country had endured through the blackouts, the bombs, the devastated lives and epic shortages of wartime – and still continued to struggle with in the years that followed. Is it any wonder that Ginger decided to take the easy option, throw the dice – and hope for the best?

CHAPTER 5
N EIGHBOURS
     
    O ur street wasn’t exactly the sort of place you’d wistfully recall as the setting for an idyllic, rose-tinted childhood reverie. No gardens, fields or open spaces. You’d hear the odd sparrow chirping sometimes, but that was the only evidence of nature around us. This place was narrow and bleak, scarred by war damage and years of poverty. In the thirties, the area had been part of the beginnings of slum clearance. But then war broke out. Socially, the street also defied the somewhat sentimental legend that the chirpy, chippy East Enders endured the worst of the war years and beyond by sticking together like glue, helping each other out frequently and popping in and out of each other’s homes all the time.
    Perhaps this was true elsewhere. But it didn’t apply here; the daily struggle to survive, feed the family and keep going took up all of our neighbours’ energy. People would greet each other, chat briefly – ‘looks like it’s gonna rain’ – then go about their business. There were fewer invitations to come round for a cuppa and cheerful, friendly exchanges than my mum had known in Leeds, where locals had made the evacuated family welcome. In any case, apart from our block of 12 flats, built in the late thirties but having mysteriously survived the bombs and the chaos, there weren’t any neat rows of terrace houses to pop in and out of. If you’re living amid ruin, relying on meagre rations to feed yourself and your family, you’re unlikely to be inviting the people next door round for a slap-up meal.
    The tiny street was dominated by the handiwork of the Luftwaffe. Adjacent to our block of flats were the bombed-out remnants of what had once been two modest workmen’s cottages. Inside one of these derelict ruins, living heaven knows how, was a ‘foreign’ couple, rumoured to be from a faraway place called Cyprus. They never talked to anyone. And adjacent to the bombed-out cottages was what had once been a third one, knocked down by the local authority just before the war as part of the planned slum clearance and then turned into a public bomb shelter.
    Almost opposite the old shelter was the front door to the corner house, badly wrecked but still inhabited by the Coopers, their toddler kids Bobby and his sister Mary, the family waiting stoically, like so many others, for the authorities to rehouse them. Their home, though damaged, damp and dark, was technically deemed to be ‘habitable’, so they had to wait a few years. Not surprisingly, all conversations with Mrs Cooper tended to be dominated by this topic.
    ‘I’ve ’eard nuffink from those bleeding bastards down the ’ousing department Mrs ’yams,’ was Mrs Cooper’s perennial greeting.
    ‘ ’Ow do they fink we can bring up two kids in a piss ’ole like this?’
    She had a point. The Coopers had an outside loo but no bathroom; they’d have to go to Hackney Baths once a week, if that, if they wanted a bath, rather than a strip wash. The third bombsite, at the other end of our street, had also been a family house. When we moved into the area it was nothing more than bricks, dust, debris and rubbish; indeed, it gradually became a bit of a playground for local roughnecks, until the authorities constructed a tin wall around it, too high for even the most determined street chancer to clamber over.
    Over time, this site became a sort of tumbledown car yard, run by an older man called Charlie and his son, Len. It was never really clear what they actually did inside the yard – or how they’d come to acquire the site from the authorities