Cracked Eggs and Chicken Soup - A Memoir of Growing Up Between The Wars. Norman Jacobs
ask for saveloys here, but then you couldn’t get soup as well. It was a case of either/or. I was invariably told to get the soup as we had saveloys once but they were 80 per cent bread so we never got them again.
Having dealt with the grocery department I moved along to the soup giver. He was a great favourite of mine; known by our family as ‘the fat cook’, he was a stout, domineering man with a fine beard. As I gave him our can he would look me in the eyes and ask ‘Fleish or no fleish?’ If you did not want any meat you’d say ‘No fleish’. Now although the meat was, as a rule, 50 per cent fat, I was always instructed to get some, so I would return his gaze and reply in a loud voice, ‘Fleish.’ He would then glare at me and go off to a large boiler to get it.
I always took our food home for the family to eat there, but some people had their soup at the kitchen itself. There was a long table with form seating each side, set out between the boilers and the servers, where anybody, Jew or gentile, could go in and sit down to a bowl of soup and a thick slice of bread. They did three different varieties of soup: rice, pea and barley alternately, one variety per night. People who did not want the soup at all but just the groceries were given a metal disc with the portion number stamped on it. Funny, not wanting soup in a soup kitchen.
Every Passover, before they closed for the summer, we would be given four portions of various groceries for the holiday which consisted of four packets of tea and four of coffee, some ‘Toma’ marge and many other foodstuffs. I loved the smell of the coffee, its aroma came right through the packet, a red packet with Hawkins printed on it. In spite of being to see you through Passover, matzos were not supplied; these were obtainable from the shul. Dad would come back from Duke’s Place Shul with about six packets of these crunchy squares. There were two makes, Latimer’s, which we disliked as we thought them too hard, and Abrahams and Abrahams’, which were a trifle better and the ones Dad normally got.
With a growing family, the other big problem we had when Dad was out of work was finding money for clothes. This particular period of unemployment was to last several weeks and, although there were many cheap second-hand clothing shops and stalls down the Lane, they were still out of our reach financially.
One evening, as we settled down to our dinner of a slice of stale bread and marge, Mum said, ‘Jack, we really need to find some way of getting some clothes for the kids. They’re all growing up so fast that all their clothes are getting too small.’ I was certainly glad to hear this as at the time I was stuck with two pairs of boots I hated and just wanted to get shot of. The first was a pair of girl’s high lace-up boots, which I felt highly embarrassed wearing and I had several terrible ribbings at school and amongst my friends. I didn’t like it but wear them I had to. As the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers and I suppose the reality was that we were little more than beggars. The other boots I had was a pair of button-up boots that were really awkward to do up, and that’s putting it mildly. One side of the boot had six holes, the other side had matching buttons. To get the buttons through the holes a button-hook was employed, a long iron rod with a hook on the end. Putting the hook through the hole then round the button and pulling back through the hole was the method, six times for each boot. I just prayed and hoped that if Dad was going to get us some new clothes, it would include new footwear for me.
I can’t remember ever having a new pair of shoes or boots, even in good times, as they were very expensive and we mostly relied on the many second-hand stalls in and around the Lane for our footwear. Once we had them they would last as long as possible and get repaired over and over again as long as there was still an ounce of life in them. These repairs were always carried out by Dad on a last he had, which had three foot sizes. The soles were always finished off with Blakey’s metal studs, the heels having a half-round one at the back.
Dad replied, ‘What about your friend, Ada? She’s done all right for herself. How about asking her for a few cast-offs for the kids?’ Ada Bloom was an old friend of Mum’s, whom she had worked with at Toff Levy’s. Ada had done all right for herself by marrying one of the bosses and had moved off to the leafy suburbs of Stamford Hill, living in her own house in the posh Osbaldeston Road. Ada had six or seven children of her own, varying in ages from a few years older than Julie, down to a two-year-old toddler, so there were plenty of clothes to be had.
The following day, the whole family went on an expedition to Stamford Hill. It was quite an adventure for us kids as we went on the tram. Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, but thinking back now, I wonder where Dad got the money from for all the tram tickets. When we arrived at Osbaldeston Road itself I couldn’t believe it. It was nothing like any road I had ever seen near where we lived.
I think I must have walked along this stunning quiet tree-lined street full of enormous Victorian houses with my jaw open all the way until we came to no. 95, Ada’s house. There was a large knocker on the front door and Dad gave it a loud bash. Ada came to the door and looked a bit taken aback to see our motley crew on her doorstep. But her surprise soon gave way to a big smile, ‘Becky, bubbeleh,’ she said, beaming, and threw her arms round Mum. ‘So lovely to see you. Come in, come in already!’ As we went through the front door, I looked around her hallway and up the stairs and wondered how many families must be living here and where their rooms were.
She showed us in to her living room and once again my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe how big the room was. She sat us all down, with Mum and Dad sitting on a big leather sofa and us kids on the rest of the three-piece suite. The room contained a sideboard, a large gramophone, a huge table with six proper wooden chairs round it – not upside down crates – and an upright piano. I had never seen a room like this before. All this furniture! We would only have had just about enough room for the sofa in our house! Ada went off to the kitchen to rustle up some tea and cake. The cake was so delicious that I asked if there was any more. Mum immediately put her hands up, ‘Oy vey, Ikey, where’s your manners?’ she said, ‘I’m sorry about that, Ada.’ Ada smiled and said, ‘That’s all right, of course he can have some more.’ At which, Julie, David, Bill and Abie all started chorusing, ‘Me, me too. I’d like some more cake.’ I think Mum was a bit mortified as it looked as though she starved us, but Ada didn’t seem to mind at all.
After tea and cake, Mum got to the point of the visit. ‘Ada,’ she began, ‘I was wondering if you could help us out a bit. I wouldn’t normally ask, but Jack’s having a bit of a rough time at work, in fact there isn’t much work and we haven’t got a lot of money coming in. I was just hoping you might have some cast-off clothes from Clara, Rachel, Mossie and your other kinder that perhaps you don’t need any more.’
‘Of course, Becky,’ smiled Ada, ‘anything I can do to help. I’d be only too happy. You have such delightful children. So well-behaved.’ And so we left Ada Bloom’s with a sackful of children’s clothes to sort out at home.
Over the next few years as Dad drifted in and out of work and both sets of children got bigger and bigger, this pilgrimage to Osbaldeston Road in Stamford Hill became something of a regular habit. But Ada never seemed to mind. In fact it was fairly general for the better-off to give their second-hand clothes away to poorer families. It was a bit like charity shops, only missing out the middleman and going straight from the donor to the needy.
We were fortunate enough after a few weeks of unemployment to have the gas man call. It was always a red-letter day when the gas man called, but especially if it came during one of Dad’s periods of unemployment. The gas man unlocked and removed the money box, a heavy tin one, from the gas meter, spread the pennies out on the tabletop and started counting them into piles of twelve. Finishing this task, he then produced some five-shilling bank bags and put that amount of coins into each one. That accomplished, he put his share into a thick leather case and left us our rebate loose on the table. ‘What a nice, kind man,’ I said to Mum. ‘Gertcha,’ replied Mum, ‘the old bugger’s only left us what we’ve been overcharged anyway.’
This particular period of unemployment lasted several weeks, but with stale bread, cracked eggs, BMC tickets, cast-off clothes and the rest, we just about managed to struggle through. But I can still remember the day that Dad walked through the door and announced that one of the local cabinet makers, Solly Lebovsky,