Cracked Eggs and Chicken Soup - A Memoir of Growing Up Between The Wars. Norman Jacobs
was all done by hand and was therefore very labour intensive and teenage girls were a cheap source for this labour.
The work involved was not physically demanding but it did take skill and experience to do it properly. Mum was one of dozens of girls all sitting at benches along the length of the factory floor. The tobacco was delivered to the benches in boxes and sorted into two types, shredded to use for the filling and whole leaves to be used as the wrapping. A specially designed knife was used to cut the leaf to shape and then this would be filled with the shredded tobacco, not too much, not too little, and rolled to make the cigar. Experienced cigar makers, as Mum became, could produce hundreds and hundreds of identical cigars every day.
As she grew through her teens and into her early twenties, Mum turned into a graceful, good-looking young woman with jet-black hair, deep brown eyes and of medium height and slender build. Unlike the stereotype, which it was always our fate to suffer, she did not have a particularly large nose nor did she have a very swarthy complexion, having instead a rather delicate skin tone, probably owing to the fact that her ancestors had lived in this country for something like two hundred years. When out in the street, there is no doubt that she turned the heads of many boys as she made her way to and from work.
A few days after her twenty-first birthday she was promoted at work and put in charge of about half a dozen other girls. There was no extra pay for this increased responsibility but she didn’t mind as, although her basic job was still rolling cigars, she did have to take some time off this intensive and repetitive work to help the others and deal with any problems that might arise. One of the girls she was told to look after was a new girl and it was Mum’s job to teach her the ropes. This new girl’s name was Sarah Jacobs. As they got to know each other better they began to get on very well at work and, when they got the chance, they would laugh and joke together, with their main topic of conversation being boys. They even went out a few times in the evening after work. One day as they were leaving the factory, Mum casually asked Sarah who that handsome young man was that sometimes met her at the gate.
Sarah spluttered. ‘Handsome!’ she choked. ‘That’s my brother Jack. Don’t tell him he’s handsome, his head is big enough as it is.’
Mum’s eyes lit up as she pulled a cigarette packet out of her pocket, took one and offered them to Sarah. ‘Your brother? How about you should introduce us then?’
Sarah smiled. ‘So suddenly I’m a shadkhen already?’
Mum blushed, ‘Don’t talk such narrishkeit. I’m not interested in that way.’
‘Then why you should want an introduction, Becky?’
Mum smiled and shook her head as if to say this conversation is over.
Two days later, Jack was at the gate to meet Sarah. Mum took her opportunity and skipped over to speak to him. ‘Jack,’ she said before her friend could say anything, ‘how nice to meet you. Sarah has told me so much about you.’
And those were the first words spoken between the two people destined to become my parents. Jack, or John as he was known formally, was actually a couple of years younger than Mum and was born in Bell Lane, just a stone’s throw from the Dwellings. He had gone to the Jews’ Free School also in Bell Lane, and, like everyone else in his class, left school at the age of thirteen. As the East End was the centre of the furniture trade at the time many boys found themselves going on to work in one capacity or the other in it. In consultation with his father, my grandfather David, Dad chose to be apprenticed to a French-polisher.
Mum and Dad got married on St Valentine’s Day, 1914, and moved into my Aunt Betsy’s house, renting a couple of rooms from Mum’s sister. Just over two months later, on 30 April, their first child, my sister Julie, was born.
When war broke out, on 4 August that year, Dad had no desire to join up before he was made to. But, although he preferred not to rush into war, he did decide to do his bit in another way, as, on 21 December 1915, the shortest and darkest day of the year, when the lamps all over Europe were well and truly out, I was born. Dad used to joke afterwards that I was his real contribution to the war effort.
Eventually, in 1916, he received his call-up papers and he went along for his medical at the Poplar Army Recruitment Office, where he was found to be suffering from flat feet and unsuitable for front-line duties. Because of this, although he was recruited into the army, he was never sent to the trenches and spent the war on the home front, being placed in the Military Police. A lucky escape, many would say. He was assigned to the London Docks, quite close to his home, where his job mostly consisted of patrolling the area and looking out for anyone stealing from the goods landed on the dockside and watching out for deserters who might have stowed away trying to get home. Considering he was exempted from the front line because he had flat feet, it always seemed a bit curious to me that his wartime job entailed spending most of the day walking!
Although working close to home, he was not allowed to live at home, being stationed in nearby barracks instead. Because he wasn’t around to protect his family, he thought it best if Mum, Julie and I went to stay with his parents in Gateshead Place in Mile End for the duration. It was here, early in 1918, that my brother Davy was born. As you can see, being in barracks didn’t stop Dad getting home on the odd occasion.
In 1918, Dad’s flat feet became even more of an issue and he was invalided out of the army altogether. Perhaps it was all that walking round the docks that had exacerbated his condition. Once discharged, he gathered up his little family and set off for pastures new to a house in Palmer Street.
THE TENTERGROUND AND PULLOCKS, 1915–26
‘Come ’ere, you little schmuck!’ I was in trouble with Mr Lipschitz yet again. And all because I shouted out, ‘’Evening, Mr Lipshit,’ as I ran past him on the stairs. Was it my fault I kept forgetting the ‘z’ at the end of his name? ‘You show a bit of respect and call me by my proper name or I’ll speak to your mother,’ he shouted after me as I ran out in to the street. His threat didn’t worry me as Mum had no time for him anyway. The first time he told her what I’d said, she took me to one side and said, ‘Don’t you worry about old Shitty Lips, he’s just a bloody Pullock. He’s got no right to be here anyway.’
Jack Lipschitz was a tailor who lived on the ground floor of our three-storey house in Palmer Street. He was a recent immigrant, hence to us a Pullock.
Palmer Street was in Spitalfields, in an area known as the Tenterground, a name which referred to the fact that this had once been a large open area used for drying newly manufactured cloth. While still wet, this cloth was hooked onto frames called tenters and stretched taut so that the cloth would dry flat and square. The area the tenters stood on was known as a tenterground. There were several around but this particular one in Spitalfields was first established in the seventeenth century by refugee French Huguenot weavers, who were fleeing religious persecution. The establishment of their clothing industry in the area gave rise to a number of the local street names, so, as well as Tenter Street itself, there were names such as Fashion Street and Petticoat Lane.
By the early nineteenth century, the Huguenot weavers had left the area, and between 1829 and 1850, the Tenterground was developed for housing being populated mainly by Dutch Jews, who had immigrated from the Netherlands, which gave rise to the area being generally known in the early days as the Dutch Tenterground.
By the time we moved there, well over 90 per cent of the population was Jewish. But just because we were all Jewish didn’t mean we all got on. There was a big divide between those Dutch Jewish families who had been in England a long time and now saw themselves as basically English Jews and those who arrived in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century as a result of the latest pogrom in some Eastern European state or other, mainly following the assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II by a Jew, in 1881.
All foreign Jews