Page 19 - My Story

When my father was demobbed from the air force in 1946 he had got a job as manager of Dolcis
shoe store in Dagenham. I am not sure how long that lasted as he was ambitious and wanted his own
business. He cultivated the garden behind the shop and came home proudly bearing cabbages and
carrots. My mother was working as a cashier in a grocery store in Tottenham, Laceys and she would bring
home lovely custard creams and other treats, so we were eating pretty well, despite rationing, which
continued until about 1956.

I think it must have been around 1949 that my parents borrowed one thousand pounds from the
family and opened a shoe shop in Hoxton Street. Hoxton Street, in those days, was pretty slummy and
the police patrolled in pairs. None of the upmarket clubs and galleries of today! It was a market with
shops and stalls and was the end of Jackie’s and my freedom on Saturdays. We were expected to help in
the shop – Jackie as cashier and me as sole sales girl (ha-ha) amongst the great unwashed! Oh, those
smelly feet……

Still, it was an education just listening to the chat –

Where’s Fred then?
Oh, ‘e’s on is ‘olidays.
Oh, is ‘e? I suppose it’s at the government’s expense again. Where is ‘e this time?
Belmarsh – ‘e didn’t fink much of Brixton.

For the non-English amongst you, Belmarsh and Brixton are prisons.

In the summer Hoxton was pretty empty when the entire population descended on the Kent hop
fields and everyone went ‘oppin’ for their ‘olidays. Whole families would go to pick hops and there was a
fair amount of money to be earned and then drunk away on the main product of hops, beer.

I would chat away with the customers, talking them into buying ill-fitting shoes by “stretching”
them on a broom handle, “just two minutes, luv, I’ve got them on the electric stretcher in the back” or
throwing in a pair of inner soles if they were too big. Jackie took cash in a back room up a couple of steps
– you might be robbed if the cash register was on display and anyway, I don’t recall us having a cash
register. A drawer did the trick. She and my mother stood up there listening to my father’s and my sales
techniques and giggling. My father tended to lecture and advise. My attitude was, ‘You like it? We’ll
make it fit’.

So that did for our Saturdays. We were paid, I always resentful that Jackie was paid more than I
because she was older, but I had to work a lot harder – but that has always been the way of the world –
and then we were free to go off and spend Saturday night with our friends, as long as we got home at ten!

It must have been around 1949 that Jackie and Denna and I started going to Habonim, a Jewish
youth and Zionist group which had been started by Denna’s father. I never understood how or why he
was such a Zionist as he stayed in England until the end of a long life and never attempted to leave for
Israel with the minor exodus after the war. Anyway, this was a very jolly group with lots of singing and
dancing and organised hikes and it was here that we learned to sing Hava nagilah and dance the Hora.
Every meeting ended with the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikva –

Kolod balevav pnimah
Nefesh yahudi homiyah

The meetings were held in the very house on Hackney Downs where Jackie and I had been born.
A whole group of us had March birthdays and one, Stan Rose had been born the day before Jackie.
“Where were you born?” she asked, and he answered, “Right here, in this house”. We went home and
told our mother and she said, “That’s right, I shared a room with a Mrs. Rose – a miserable woman with a
miserable husband”, so there was no grand reunion there. Stan was quite jolly, though, and I went out
with him a few times before getting bored with him.

Another regular at Habonim was Arnold Wesker, the playwright, famous as one of the “angry
young men” and the writer of “kitchen sink dramas” of the ‘50s such as “Roots” and “Chicken Soup with

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