Cracked Eggs and Chicken Soup - A Memoir of Growing Up Between The Wars. Norman Jacobs
we’re going to do later.’
So, on that Saturday we ate quite well. For lunch we had more bread and marge, while Joey had some semolina washed down with some milk from his bottle which was just an ordinary medicine bottle with a teat.
In the evening we had our main meal of the day, dinner, which on this day consisted of fried ox heart with rice boiled with shredded cabbage and currants and boiled potatoes garnished with a knob of marge. Sometimes, on other good days, we might have lamb’s liver or sausages instead of the ox heart.
Sunday saw us blow nearly all the rest of the money we had with a salt beef dinner, which was really my favourite. Cooked with carrots, cabbage and potatoes in the same saucepan, I enjoyed the fat most of all, even though it always gave me a bilious headache. It was so good that I ate it anyway even knowing what the consequences would be.
Work or no work, money or no money, Sunday night was bath night. As the two eldest, Julie and I, were called on to help out in this procedure. ‘Ikey, get the bath out and Julie, start bringing up the water,’ Mum ordered. So off I went to the back room, to take the tin bath off the nail that Dad had banged into the wall to hang it on and brought it in to the front room and placed it on the floor in the living room. Julie meanwhile had started the slow and laborious process of going down to the backyard with our kettle, filling it up with water and bringing it back up the two flights of stairs to pour into a bowl on the gas stove. After I’d brought the bath in, I helped Julie by getting an old cracked enamel jug we kept in the cupboard and running up and down the stairs with her till the bowl was filled. Once Mum felt the water was warm enough she’d pour the bowl into the bath. We had to fill the bowl several times to make a bathful. By the time the last bowl was poured in, I expect the first lot of water Mum had tipped in had gone cold, but there just wasn’t any other way of filling the bath.
Julie, as the oldest and the only girl, was always the first to get in the bath, then the rest of us went in in pairs. Once in the bath, Mum would give us all a good scrubbing with a bar of Lifebuoy soap. She’d then pay special attention to our hair and used some soft soap to destroy any head lice and nits we might have, thus keeping the notorious ‘Nitty Nora’ (as schools’ nit nurses were called) at a distance. In appearance this soap looked like thick grease. It was bought in the oil shop and sold by weight and wrapped in newspaper.
Head lice were also kept at bay with regular haircuts. Dad always did these himself. He’d give us all a short back and sides with the clippers he had and shave our necks with a cut-throat razor.
As well as destroying the bugs and lice on our bodies, Mum would spend an inordinate amount of time in her perpetual battle on fleas, bugs and lice in our flat. Keating’s Powder was her favourite weapon in this war as it boasted it killed all lice and bedbugs. She religiously applied it to all bed springs and mattresses at least twice a week, but it always seemed to me that the bugs were unaware of Keating’s boast as they just carried on minding their own business and multiplying at an alarming rate. Every now and then, in an attempt to thin out these unwanted hordes, Dad would employ a sulphur candle, which gave off acrid fumes when you applied a match to it. Windows and doors had to be sealed to prevent any leakage. Alas, after each fumigation they never stayed thinned out for long. They must have thought they had squatters’ rights.
This fight against germs, lice and bugs went on incessantly. Carbolic was yet another aid in keeping the germs at bay. Bought as a liquid it was added to a pail of water and Mum would set to scrubbing the floors, which were mainly bare boards. Sunlight Soap, scrubbing brush and flannel were the other articles required in this operation.
STALE BREAD, CRACKED EGGS AND THE BUN HOUSE, 1919–26
With practically all of Dad’s money gone, Mum had to think of how to eke out the little we had left until Dad could find some more work. So, very early on Monday morning, while Dad made his rounds of the furniture shops in Whitechapel looking for work as a lino-layer, Mum turned to Julie and me and said, ‘You two’ll have to skip school this morning and go out and find what food you can for as little as you can. Ikey, you go off to Funnel’s and get some stale bread,’ and gave me sixpence. As I opened the door, Mum called after me, ‘Don’t forget the pillowcase, Ikey!’ I raced down the stairs and went off to our local baker’s with my pillowcase. You had to go very early in the morning as many other families were in the same plight as us and were having to do the same thing. We were not always lucky but, on this day when I asked for ‘sixpenn’orth of stale bread, please’ I was very lucky as the lady in the shop threw five loaves of differing shapes and sizes in various stages of staleness into my pillow case. When I got them home, Mum broke out into a big smile and patted me on the head, saying, ‘Well done, Ikey! That’ll keep us going for a bit. Let’s sort them out.’ We then sorted out the fresher, or should I say the least stale, for eating, and the remainder were put aside to be soaked down for a bread pudding. Delicious.
Julie meanwhile had been dispatched to Kramer’s, a big provision store in the Lane, on the corner of Wentworth Street and Goulston Street, to get some eggs. The eggs were sold outside the shop from a long stall on which were placed four or five long wooden crates of eggs. The lady who sold the eggs stood with her back to the wall behind the stall. Julie was also given sixpence, but she had a basin rather than a pillowcase. When she reached the stall, she said to the lady, ‘Sixpenn’orth of cracks, please.’ The lady then put in a dozen cracked eggs from a tray marked, ‘best new laid’. Whether they were new laid or not was very debatable. As always, when Julie got them home and Mum cracked them open, at least three or four of them were found to have gone bad.
Mum gave me and Julie a bit of crust each as a reward and then said, ‘Time to get some washing done.’ This was a regular Monday-morning chore, whether Dad was in work or out of it. Once again I had to get the bath out, only for washing this time. I placed it on our table rather than the floor, and Julie and I had to bring the water up from the yard. A similar process to bath night took place as Mum heated up the water and poured it into the bath. Regular washing of clothes was, of course, along with the never-ending battle against the invasion of lice and bugs, all part of trying to keep our family clean.
Once Mum had decided the bath had enough water in, she put all the clothes in and scattered some Rinso or Hudson’s Washing Powder over them and left them for a few minutes to soak, while she placed our washboard next to the bath. Then she would take the clothes out one by one, place them on the washboard and give them a good hard vigorous rub with some Sunlight Soap. It was bloody hard work and, of course, while she was sweating away doing this, she had to keep an eye on all us children, which in itself was a full-time job. Most times, she would just tell us to go out and play in the street. It seems funny to say that in this day and age, but off we’d go, including the two-year-old Abie, in fact all of us except the baby, to play outside. Normally she would place Joey in his large makeshift cot, made from yet another orange box. Although we were very young to be outside on our own, there was not much fear of traffic in those days, though I do remember that one day when we were jumping on and off Tingle Jacobs’s low loaders as we often did – the idea being that as many boys as possible would jump on and then one of us would shout out ‘whip behind Guv’nor’ when we saw Mr Jacobs or one of his men approaching and we would all jump off – I gave a big leap off the back and got run over by a horse-drawn cart that was coming along. Luckily I was unhurt.
That evening, Dad got back quite late. He sat down and took his boots off before saying a word. Then he just shook his head, looked at Mum and said, ‘Nothing! No one wants any polishing, no one wants any lino laid and even the bloody club said they’ve got enough waiters at the moment. It’s desperate out there, Becky. Everyone looking for work that doesn’t exist. So much for Lloyd George’s land fit for sodding heroes.’
Mum started sobbing again. ‘What are we going to do, Jack? Ikey got us some stale bread this morning and Julie got some cracked eggs but that was nearly all the money we had.’
‘I’ll