Growing up in Fifties London
Alex Kasko recalls growing up in Fifties London
Shepherd’s Bush was an unfashionable area in the Fifties so our family of five could afford to live in the top floor of a converted villa for the princely sum of £10 a quarter.
Once a week, on bath night, we took the cover off the bath in our kitchen. Opposite our inside toilet was a coal bunker which the coal man climbed eight flights of stairs to fill. Above us was the attic, a place of mystery that held the discarded goods of previous tenants.
A tiny balcony accessible only by climbing through the bedroom’s sash window was a playground for me and my friends. It faced a house that my mother told me in shocked tones was a brothel. We used to hear the call of the rag-and-bone man echoing along the street, accompanied by the clip-clop of his horse’s hooves. Outdoors, our playground was a dead-end road round the corner. Further afield, in the children’s playground at Holland Park (which was little more than an open space in the forest) I tried to make bows and arrows from sticks and bits of string. In the summer I liked to go to Shepherd’s Bush
Green to play, unless the circus was in town, when the green was occupied by camels!
In the early years my mother would sell bags of rags in order to buy a gallon of paraffin. Saturdays often meant a trip to Portobello Road market where she sold her mother’s jewellery. When I was old enough to walk the mile or two to school in Notting Hill and back on my own, she got a job with a company that had a lobby full of enormous cine cameras which reminded me of HG Wells’ three-legged Martians. My parents swelled with pride when we achieved the giddy social height of owning a telephone. They were even prouder when a fridge replaced the icebox that needed a hammer and a screwdriver to break up the iceberg that formed inside it every week. Every weekend we went to Sunday School; first at the Protestant church then later at the Russian Orthodox church. The latter was run by nuns who were astounded I spoke Russian and Ukrainian. My Ukrainian godmother lived in the flat below us and I was bilingual until I started school. When I was older, it was Ukrainian refugees who introduced me to vodka! For our family holidays we travelled in the sidecar of my father’s Harley-Davidson. Foreign travel for us was camping in Wales.
Then my father got a car! It had a hole in the chassis and on one journey my little dog was sleeping in the footwell when we went drove through a deep puddle of water. He jumped up and scrabbled over to the back seat with an indignant ‘woof’! My childhood ended when we moved to the suburbs… but that’s another story.
‘Mum got a job with a company that had enormous cine cameras which reminded me of HG Wells’ threelegged Martians’