E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5420-4
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
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3 Hackney The pre-war Hackney was not the Hackney of today. Old landmarks have been demolished and it lies under the shadows of the all-conquering tower blocks. But not all has changed. Hackney station and the railway viaduct over Mare Street are still to be seen, much as they were in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Nearby are the remnants of an even older Hackney: the old Regency Town Hall, now a bank, and behind it the isolated tower of St Augustine’s. The tower is all that remains of a medieval foundation. Further back is the ‘new’ parish church of St John’s that replaced the old church in the eighteenth century. By the railway bridge is a dip in the road that marks the site of the old village pond, for Hackney was once a village. This pond or ‘mere’ is the ‘mere’ in Mare Street. The pond was formed by a ford of the long-lost Hackney Brook which once crossed Mare Street. Further along Mare Street is the Hackney Empire, that cockney baroque fantasy with its bulbous towers owing something to Byzantium – one of the last Edwardian music halls in London. These towers of bygone ages – the Edwardian, the Regency and the Gothic – are the survivors of the Hackney that was. But although they survive, they no longer dominate. The air is clearer now. Then, the skies were always murky and the days of my Hackney childhood were lived under a perpetual hazy canopy the colour of lentil soup. After a seaside holiday I wept when returning to Hackney and saw the dusky hues of its skies and its dull grey streets. I yearned for the bright colours of the seaside with its golden sands and deep blue sea. The social scene of Hackney has changed. Before the war it was a warm place housing a mixed community: rich man, poor man, Jew and Gentile all coexisted humanely in two- or three-storey houses. Life then was not packaged in hygienic cellophane. Horses with their oat bags struggled and sweated under heavy loads on cobbled streets; the sweet smell of their sweat mingled with the odour of petrol fumes. Water troughs were still in place on all the main streets. Once, on a wet day, I saw a horse slip on a greasy road and collapse in a muddle between the shafts. An angry driver whipped the poor trapped animal as it tried to struggle on its feet. The cruelty of that scene stays vividly in my memory. In Well Street the occasional flock of sheep was to be seen as they were shepherded along their way to a slaughterhouse. These things were reminders of a village past, when my grandmother could stand in Morning Lane and look across fields to Hackney Marsh. There was death as well as life in the Hackney of those days. In the butcher’s, carcasses of animals hung in gory display blatantly proclaiming their origins. There was a dark side to these picturesque scenes. There was the bluebottle and other members of the fly family who had a fancy both for horses’ droppings and for foods that were exposed for sale in dairies and butcher’s shops. Sooner or later we children fell ill with the fevers of the town. We would boast to each other of the diseases we had had. I was low in this pecking order, with but pneumonia, whooping cough, measles and diphtheria to my name. To my shame I missed out on scarlet fever, mumps and chickenpox. There were many fever hospitals to accommodate us, and more were being built as war broke out, but after the war they were not needed as fevers disappeared from London streets. Hygiene had improved and antibiotics had arrived. Trams still rattled down Mare Street and dominated the street scene. There were no overhead wires; instead the trams picked up their current via a conduit that ran between the rails. It was Grandfather Wilson’s humble job to clean these out at night. Once he had been an ostler in the days of the horse trams, but those days had gone and he was reduced to this. It never crossed my young mind that the day would come when these dinosaurs of transport would go. But go they would, for soon the trolleybus would arrive. These had first appeared in the seaside towns and Dickie Drage had boasted to me that he had ridden on one of these marvels of the age when on holiday. I was suitably impressed by his adventure. Eventually they came to Hackney and excited our curiosity. We boys would ask each other: ‘Have you had a ride on a trolleybus?’ Our eyes were wide open as we gazed at what were little more than trams without tracks. Now our eyes are dulled by a surfeit of technological achievement. Ancient double-decker buses vied with trams on the streets of Hackney. They carried history with them. The conductor still spoke of ‘inside’ instead of ‘downstairs’ and ‘outside’ instead of ‘upstairs’. They were strange vehicles. At the rear was a curling open staircase apparently stuck on as an afterthought. It resembled a fire escape. Climbing that staircase on a wet and windy day was an unpleasant experience that still sticks in my memory. I did not know then that it told the story of the evolution of the London double-decker. Sometime in the previous century, in the days of the stagecoach, second-class passengers had been accommodated on the roof and the horse omnibus adopted this practice. A ladder had been added for the convenience of the passengers. This arrangement had survived the passing of the horse omnibus and was to be found in the early petrol buses, where the upper deck was open, literally outside, and was only later roofed in. But the staircase was left, as it had been in the days of the stagecoach, open to the elements. At the end of the thirties the final step was taken and the staircase enclosed. Shire horses pulled coal carts black with dust. On top of piled black sacks, coalmen stood clad in black aprons and strange black hoods, red eyes glittering strangely in their blackened faces. These apparitions were hawking coal and shouting out their prices: ‘One and eleven’ – 1s 11d per hundredweight. Great horses pulled brewers’ drays that drew up outside public houses. I would watch the brewers’ men roll wooden barrels down curious concave ladders on to the pavement and thence, via a manhole, into the cellars below. There were also smaller horses that pulled a variety of carts; I remember the milk carts best. Through the mists of time they appear beautiful things, with bright churns bound by gleaming brass hoops. A ladle drooped by the churn and a smile adorned the face of a cheerful milkman who, more often than not, wore a striped apron. I once had to write an essay on why a horse was better than a motor-van for delivering milk. What did I say? That the horse was better at starting and stopping than the petrol engine. That while the milkman was delivering the milk a well-trained horse would move on to the next door. Another horse-drawn vehicle was sometimes to be seen in Hackney – the funeral carriage. Funerals were different in those days. Black-plumed horses drawing black coaches were still to be seen, a stately entourage suitable for the dignity of a funeral. I was taught by my mother always to show respect. So when a funeral approached, slowly progressing down a street, I would stand still, doff my cap and drop my head. But the past was slipping away. The hurdy-gurdy and the barrel organ were becoming rare and the muffin man had all but vanished from the streets. Only once did I hear the magic of the muffin bell. I did not understand what the ring meant until my mother pointed out the muffin man to me. He was then a curiosity. My mother told me that when she was young there were many of them. I fancy that at some time or another the bureaucrats banned the muffin bell – typical – but the bell of the Toni ice-cream van was allowed. There were no Toni vans in those days but much in evidence were the Stop-Me-And-Buy-One Wall’s ice-cream men. They were sited at strategic positions in the streets where they sat on their blue-and-white three-wheeled box cycles – now venerable antiques – to tempt us children as we passed by. Their rivals and predecessors, the Italian ice-cream men, were still on the streets with their timeless ice-cream barrows painted with swirling floral designs and covered by red-and-white-striped awnings supported by twisted brass columns. These were the picturesque hokey-pokey vendors, but my mother did not favour them, casting doubt on their cleanliness; their barrows did look old and battered, often needing paint. They were losing out and I bought my ice cream from the Wall’s tricycle men. Common still at that time were the rag-and-bone men. They alone still had a street cry, a cry of some poignant beauty. Recycling was a reality in those far-off days and they seemed to accept any rubbish. Sometimes they paid us boys in pennies, sometimes with sweets and sometimes with goldfish in a bowl. Alas, today our city streets are bereft of this light humour of life. No longer do sheep wander the streets and bookies play hide-and-seek with policemen. Now even the trees have diminished. When I was a child Hackney boasted many trees but they seemed to give some offence to the local authority who, over the years, under one pretext or another, have chopped them down so that Hackney is no longer leafy. The parish church of Hackney is St John’s; its white baroque steeple sits incongruously on a plain classical body of grey brick. In the thirties the churchyard was peppered with decaying monuments and overhung by heavy trees, making it dark and gloomy. My father disliked it intensely – he felt death there. Today the trees have been felled and the tombstones moved to the edge of the churchyard. There is now a small pleasant green, a popular walkway for the people of Hackney. My mother had no such inhibitions about the...
