When it was necessary to buy something for the house, we did not go to Kilburn but to John Barnes in Finchley Road. It was the biggest store for miles and sold clothes, furniture and all kinds of household goods. We walked down Broadhurst Gardens in the other direction from West End Lane, past all the bomb sites (which later became council estates) and it eventually opened into Finchley Road with the John Barnes store on the corner. Broadhurst Gardens and Finchley Road were the heart of the Jewish refugee community. You seldom heard a word of English spoken there. The office of the Association of Jewish Refugees was in Finchley Road, and nearby was its offshoot, the United Restitution Organisation (URO) where my father was later given an interesting job as office factotum.
West Hampstead underground station was on the other side of the Broadhurst Gardens/West End Lane T-junction. A newsagent had a stand beside it where my father always bought his evening paper. Alongside the line ran another way down to Finchley Road, a quiet footpath which I loved. There were actually three stations within easy walking distance of the Mews. West Hampstead Midland (now West Hampstead Thameslink) was in Sheriff Road and West End Lane LMS station a little further down West End Lane. That was where we went on fine summer Sundays for trains to Hampstead Heath or Gospel Oak (for the Lido), or in the other direction to Richmond or Kew.
We would take a big bag with sandwiches, green salad veg, a thermos of tea, plastic plates and a big plaid throw to sit on, and spend the day walking and enjoying some green space for a change. Hampstead Heath was our commonest destination. Sometimes we went by train but more often we took the no.28 bus up to Golders Hill Park. We would get off the bus and walk down the small tree-lined road which I called Shady Lane and which led to the park. We would walk through the little petting zoo and feed the animals. They had goats and rabbits and a few peacocks and other ornamental fowl. Then we would climb the wide sandy steps at the back of the park, made of knotted tree roots and odd rocks and bits of wood and come out onto the Heath proper.
We would walk for an hour or so, then spread the rug under a tree and have our lunch. In the afternoon, we sometimes went to the ponds. Or we would walk up to Kenwood and have tea at the Old Coach House. I was fascinated by the small birds which hopped around between the tables and sometimes perched on the tables themselves, cheekily helping themselves to a bite. They were so pretty with their black-edged chestnut wing feathers, their slate-blue heads, chestnut cheek patches and black bibs. It took me quite some time to realise that these were sparrows, the same kind of sparrows as the ones that pecked around the cobbles of West Hampstead Mews. Our London sparrows looked completely different because their feathers were dull with soot and you couldn’t see the colours.
The London air was filthy in those days. Thick yellow smog was common in winter. Many people heated with open fires that burned smoky coal, not anthracite like our stoves. In winter, you could see smoke coming from almost every chimney. Most of the chimneys had cowls of various kinds to prevent the smoke blowing back down them again. Some of these were simple constructions of angled metal pipes; others actually rotated in the wind, presumably to drive off the smoke through centrifugal force. When there was smog, schools closed early and we were enjoined to put scarves over our mouths and breath through them. In 1952 there was a smog that lasted for days and is said to have killed a lot of people. After that, the Clean Air Act was passed, and London changed for the better.
When I was small, West Hampstead was still scarred by the blitz. Many houses had steel X-shapes screwed onto them where the wall had been damaged by a bomb and needed reinforcement. There were still bomb sites everywhere. These served as adventure playgrounds for the local children. They were fenced off with chain link of course but there were always holes that you could creep through. The sites were a wilderness of brambles, rose bay willowherb, Aaron’s rod and mugwort. In autumn there were blackberries everywhere and the grown-ups would come to collect them.
Everyone made conserves in the 1950’s. Most English people made jam, hence the demand for blackberries. My mother did not, but she saved orange peel and bought Seville oranges in the autumn for the next year’s supply of the marmalade that she and my father ate for breakfast (I did not like it). She also conserved whole fruit such as plums and apricots in jars, and made jars of pickled gherkins for my father. And every autumn she would fill a glass flask with morello cherries packed in sugar and put it on a sunny windowsill. The juice leaked out of the cherries and dissolved the sugar, and the mix soon began to ferment and bubble. By Christmas, there was a dark-red mildly alcoholic drink for my parents to enjoy and the shrivelled cherries could be used to decorate fruit salads.
Every weekend my mother baked. There was always home-made cake in our house. Sometimes she made an apple tart with latticework over the top. Sometimes it was a cheesecake, a gugelhupf with a hole through the middle, or a cake made with “snow” (beaten egg white). I loved to stir the cake mix for her until it was smooth enough for baking. The sweet sticky residue that clung to the sides of the mixing bowl was my “wages” for the task.
She particularly valued the small oval plums that we called zwetschken, because their stones came out easily (unlike those of pflaumen, the ordinary round plums) and therefore they could be used to make zwetschkenknödl, the delicious sweet boiled dumplings that we all loved. You replaced the stones with sugar cubes, then wrapped them in dough and dropped them into boiling water. They rose to the surface spontaneously when they were done. You could make something similar with apricots (marillenknödl) but they were not as nice.
I think my father’s favourite was cheese sticks. I can’t remember how she made them beyond the obvious fact that there was grated hard cheese in the mix, but they were delicious. She formed the dough into spirally twisted sticks, pretzels and disc shapes cut out with a liqueur glass and then baked them. Unlike cake, they lasted for days and never went stale. For birthdays and other special occasions, she would bake a strudel made with yeast dough that was rolled out flat, spread with a sweet mixture containing chopped nuts or poppyseed and rolled up again for baking. But she almost never made apple strudel, that quintessential Viennese dish. She couldn’t draw the elastic dough out thinly enough. It always went into holes and that drove her crazy with frustration.
Both my parents worked. There’s a popular perception that in the 50’s, all women were “just housewives” but in fact that was very much a middle class thing. In poor families like ours, women had to work. One income alone wouldn’t feed a child. When I was still very small, my mother worked in a flexographic print shop somewhere in Leather Lane. Before the war, printing had been an all-male preserve because the unions wouldn’t let women in, but that all changed when the men had to go off to fight. My mother loved the job. Flexography is done with rubber cut in relief instead of cast metal and she became a skilled cutter. I still have her set of interchangeable razor-sharp knife blades. Of course, as soon as the men came back from fighting Hitler, my mother was thrown out of work again. She died eventually of bladder cancer, a disease often caused by exposure to printing inks, which had once affected only men.
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