Read Polly for Free Online Page A

it was a big family to feed and clothe. Anyway, I remember the time when they made a rag rug. These rugs were made by knotting together strips of rag in a particular sort of way and were very popular, I suppose they were cheap and nobody could afford carpets. Anyway, the Bacons sat round as a family and made this quite large rug. Then Mr Bacon went round the street selling tickets to raffle it. It was pretty good, well made and with good colours, so Mum showed abit of interest. From then on she got the hard sell. He even cleared a space in front of the fire and showed her how good it looked. She agreed it looked good, but that was no help because she couldn’t be sure of winning – at which Mr Bacon said he was sure she would win if she bought a ticket for five bob! Sure enough, she did win the rug, but she never took part in any more of the Bacons’ money-making schemes because she didn’t know who else had bought a ticket for five bob.
    Life in the East End in the Depression wasn’t easy, but we had our moments. I suppose in lots of ways we enjoyed even the simplest things more because they were so special and so unusual. The highlight of every year was Christmas and going to the Christmas pantomime. The rich people went on Boxing Day, because that was always a bit more expensive, but we used to go a day or so later. We always went to the Borough Theatre on the corner of Bridge Road – it was turned into a cinema later [Editor’s note: the Rex]. The other theatres in Stratford were the Empire in the Broadway, but that was very posh and too expensive for us, and the Theatre Royal in Angel Lane [Editor’s note: later the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, famous for Joan Littlewood’s work], but that was too rough. The outing to the pantomime was a big event shared by all the neighbours. We always went to a matinee and us kids were sent up to the theatre to queue straight after breakfast. We would stay there all morning until lunchtime when the mums (and sometimes dads) would come up and bring sandwiches to eat. By the time we had eaten them the doors would open and in we would go. While the mums bought the tickets us kids had to run upstairs as fast as we could go to grab the right number of seats on the front row of the ‘gods’. We would watch the show from there.
    Because he was in the market, Dad didn’t work on Mondays and so when I left school and started work he used to make my lunch for me on Monday mornings. He didn’t have much idea really so there was nothing delicate about his lunches, but they were ever so welcome. He would just cut a couple of slices of bread and stick a quarter-pound of cheese between them, adding a cucumber from the market and anything else that came to hand. When I got to work I used to take the lunch apart again and share it out between those who were short. Sometimes three or four girls would share that lunch, and Monday became a high point of the week. As soon as I arrived at work girls would ask what ‘dad’ had given them for lunch today. It does doesn’t bear thinking about, but that is how you live when things are really tight.
    When Fred and I got married we took half a house, just up the road from Mum. In the downstairs half was a woman and her husband with five kids. Notonly that, she had a brother who was out of work. He lived in one room a little distance away but spent a lot of time with the family (when he wasn’t looking for work, that is) and always had Sunday dinner with them. The woman used to go out late on Saturday, when the meat was cheap – well, the butchers didn’t have refrigerators like today so what they didn’t sell on Saturday would be spoiled by Monday. The woman, her husband and her brother would then have the meat, whatever was cheap, for their dinner and the kids would have rabbit stew. Rabbit was always cheap. That was the only meat they ate all week, just on Sunday.
    I remember one