Page 13 - My Story

My Story: POST WAR 1945 – 1953

Oh, what celebrations there were. A feeling of relief, of freedom pervaded. There were street
parties – my mother, sister and I cut endless sandwiches, Jackie and I carefully spreading whatever there
was to be spread, probably fish paste, to the very edges of the bread as instructed by Mummy. Cakes
were made from powdered, reconstituted eggs and whatever sugar ration could be spared. People dug
out bunting and decorated the whole outdoors. It was a laughing, cheering holiday and everyone was
friends.

My mother Mary with Ruth & Jackie circa 1947

As soon as term was over, we went back to London and lived, briefly at Granny’s. It must have
been a tight squeeze – my Aunt Fay and Uncle Bunny already lived there, and Auntie Fay ran her business
out of one of the rooms. She sat at her Singer sewing machine all day producing large pink corsets for
large ladies who would come to the house to be fitted and have the whale bones adjusted. It seemed
that in those days every woman wore one of these corsets and I awaited my turn with some trepidation.

The family was engaged to find us somewhere to live and a cousin of my father, one Barney Sint,
offered us four rooms over a shop in Mare Street, Hackney. The shop was actually a sewing workshop
called Marin and the owner, a youngish woman, used to come upstairs and chat with my mother

Our new home consisted of a large kitchen/living room, a sitting/dining room and a bedroom each
for my parents and we two girls. There was a toilet on a half landing just below the kitchen and a bathroom
on a half landing just above the bedrooms. You entered this apartment through a front door which
opened onto Lambs’ Lane. If you walked along Lambs’ Lane you came to London Fields, a playground and
London Fields Station. In the front of the building were buses and trolley buses. The 677 trolley bus which
went to New North Road, the 653 trolley bus which took us to school in Clapton and then on to Stamford
Hill, the number 6 bus which came up Well Street and made its way to Shoreditch and Liverpool Street
and on through the City to the Bank and Mansion House to the West End. Hackney had no tube station
and our nearest one was Bethnal Green.

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