2

There's a powerful sepia memory taken at my parents' wedding
reception, a snapshot of new hope from my family's olden times. It was
taken in 1959, at the end of an era, the light switch flickering from
bobby-soxers to teenagers, from James Stewart to James Dean. It felt
like a new, peaceful world, the war wounds finally beginning to fade.
It was my mum and dad's moment in the sun, their finest hour. They
could talk about it for hours, so could many.
In the photograph my dad is grimacing; all brilliantine, bravado and
winklepickers. His legs are spread wide in a typical Bethnal Green
boxing stance, ready to take on all comers. He was known for having
knocked a few people out, even then. His appearance is heroic, cool and
vicious; someone could have his or her nose broken at any moment. My
mum, in contrast, is a shocking tipsy blonde, a cockney confetti Monroe
laughing madly with unrestrained joy, her ice-white dress hitched up to
a gartered thigh. A beautiful woman on her twentieth birthday, my mum,
spinning on the cusp of her life, her world mapped out in its entirety
from that day on.
Behind my parents stand two grainy figures, near ghosts trapped in
blinding sodium searchlights. One is my nan, dribbling from one side of
her mouth in her jaunty moth-eaten hat, thick brown tights sagging at
the knee. The other is my cancer-ridden granddad, bleak and skeletal in
an oversized dandruff-flecked suit. The pair of them look as if they
have never met each other in their whole lives.
My mum and dad's wedding was on the first sunny afternoon of that year,
a May scorcher. My mum always smirks and blushes a little whenever this
has been mentioned by any of our family, but the whole congregation
must have been smashed on cheap booze before they even got to the
church. Mum has admitted once or twice that she might have had a small
sherry with Nan whilst they waited for the horse-drawn carriage to
deliver them to the ceremony in Poplar, but only one tiny snifter to
stiffen her nerves. I've never believed her. She fell out of the rusty
thing as it parked up at the church. It's a miracle that her dress
remained unscathed, what with the freshly-dropped manure. My shaking
granddad tried to pull her up, but she slipped again.
Inside, mum skipped up the aisle blowing tipsy kisses at all the old
Toms, wide boy young Dicks and breast-fed baby-faced Harrys packing the
little church to the rafters. Their wives and girlfriends gasped, half
in anger, half in admiration, as every one of those beer-breathed East
End men wolf-whistled back at her.
My embarrassed granddad shuffled behind in tortured pain, a broken man.
I've often questioned what he felt about his once-podgy little girl,
the child that used to sit on his knee, pulling his hair and poking his
ear, transforming herself into a sexpot starlet before his eyes like a
nasty magic trick. She never said it, but she loved him so much.
The intense heat of the day took everyone by surprise, especially the
best man. His name was Tony Gilbert and he fainted at the altar like
the proverbial sack of potatoes, just before the appearance of the
rings. The poor fella had to be resuscitated with some smelling salts
and a brandy knee trembler. My dad made an obvious joke about Tony and
a packet of wine gums and everyone roared with laughter, including the
vicar, who in another photograph taken that day does not look at all
saintly, smoking a big cigar with his dog collar stuffed into his
pocket. The pre-wedding rumours were that he liked to take a drink, it
was true.
The evening reception was wildly gin-sodden. My mum and dad have always
said that it was the booziest night in the history of the East End. Who
am I to disbelieve them? It was a right old traditional knees-up, held
in the old King's Head on the Romford Road, a duckers' and divers' pub
of renown. All sorts of characters were there: tinkers, tailors, real
celebrity gangsters and the local constabulary. There was a little band
playing the hits of the day, The Tony Cortino Three, middle-aged men in
crushed velvet who crooned, swooned and ruined the repertoires of
Johnny Ray and Frank Sinatra in high old style. My dad banned them from
singing anything by Elvis; he was a man now, after all, and those new
songs were for kids. All the invited and the not so invited carried on
dancing until four o'clock in the morning.
The pub began to run out of alcohol after just a few hours, an
emergency that prompted a late night flit in a wheezing van to meet
some boys down near Surrey Docks. The van returned an hour later with
champagne, oysters, French letters and cigarettes. No one knew who paid
for it all; somebody who knew somebody was owed a favour. A nudge, a
wink and maybe the flash of a knife secured the continuing
reverie.
As the night wore its seething way there was drunken back-alley
fumbling from couples that should have known better. How many children
were conceived? A few, maybe; Tony Gilbert has always told me that he
blamed that night for the first of his ten sons and the start of his
own terrible troubles. Tony has told me a lot of tales over the years;
he has an active memory. He colours the truth, but it's always
there.
As the stars melted into a Stratford dawn, my Nan tried to kiss the
half-cut vicar, there was a fistfight involving the landlord and my
dad, a young boy grabbed the microphone and spluttered the first verse
of Blue Suede Shoes and there was shattered glass on the pavement.
Everything was how it should have been. Sirens and blood.
My poor granddad; he went home much earlier, not long after that
photograph was taken. He just about managed a solitary, sluggish walk
through the darkening streets to Ilford, stepping towards his slow,
inevitable death.
The newly-weds moved away on the following Monday morning. A rainy
smog-soaked Mile End farewell, a stolen Morris Minor and screaming
rows. My dad had promised my mum a much bigger car and there was not
enough room for the suitcases and the ironing board. It took two trips
and a slap on her face to finish the job and not one of the reception
guests came out to say goodbye or wish them luck. My mum heard later
from Nan that those fast-fading neighbours were preoccupied with
something else, not even their hangover, but a cold light of day
jealousy that was brewing into a terrible hate. Mum was hurt when she
found out the real story; her moment of glory had vanished quickly. She
felt the first strains of loneliness.
A stream of badness flowed through London that summer, starting in the
fringes but soon flooding the centre. The city my parents grew up in
and were now leaving was changing beyond recognition. A new family was
about to move into my dad's vacant thin-walled Stepney pre-fab, a
freshly-ironed couple from Trinidad with their three-year-old son. That
proud family were about to suffer terrors beyond their innocent belief,
as would many others. There were cracked windows and excrement on the
doorstep within a week.
My dad told all and sundry that everyone who had moved away from the
ruined East End was well rid of it. There would be no wogs here. Their
future would be golden and white, there would be nothing to worry about
from here on in. This attitude was nothing but blissed-out ignorance,
of course. They were just guinea pigs in a great experiment, an attempt
to create a New England. What they found when they arrived at their new
destination on that drizzly Monday afternoon was a different world
altogether from all they had known before. It was a place of ferocity,
of barking dogs, buildings and streets the colour of pale ale. They
came to the badlands. A town named Basildon. The world was about to
heat up; the fifties values were dying, but not here. The other new
generation was about to explode elsewhere.