Life [9]
The fact that I couldn’t buy a bag of sweets until 1954 says a lot about the upheavals and changes that last for so many years after a war. The war had been over for nine years before I could actually, if I had the money, go and say, “I’ll have a bag of them”—toffees and Aniseed Twists. Otherwise it was “You got your ration stamp book?” The sound of those stamps stamping. Your ration was your ration. One little brown paper bag—a tiny one—a week.
Bert and Doris had met working in the same factory in Edmonton—Bert a printer and Doris working in the office—and they had started out together living at Walthamstow. They had done a lot of cycling and camping during their courtship before the war. It brought them together. They bought a tandem and used to go riding into Essex and camping with their friends. So when I came along, as soon as they could, they used to take me on the back of their tandem. It must have been very soon after the war, or maybe even during the war. I can imagine them driving through an air raid, plowing ahead. Bert in front, Mum behind and me on the back, on the baby seat, mercilessly exposed to the sun’s rays, throwing up from sunstroke. It’s been the story of my life ever since—on the road again.
In the early part of the war—before my arrival—Doris drove a van for the Co-op bakers, even though she told them she couldn’t drive. Luckily, in those days there were almost no cars on the road. She drove the van into a wall when she was using it illegally to visit a friend, and they still didn’t fire her. She also drove a horse and cart for bread deliveries closer to the Co-op, to save the wartime fuel. Doris was in charge of cake distribution for a big area. Half a dozen cakes for three hundred people. And she would be the decider of who would get them. “Can I have a cake next week?” “Well, you had one last week, didn’t you?” A heroic war. Bert was in a protected job, in valve manufacturing, until D-day. He was a dispatch rider in Normandy just after the invasion, and got blown up in a mortar attack, his mates killed around him. He was the only survivor of that particular little foray, and it left a very nasty gash, a livid scar all the way up his left thigh. I always wanted to get one when I grew up. I’d say, “Dad, what’s that?” And he’d say, “It got me out the war, son.” It left him with nightmares for the rest of his life. My son Marlon lived a lot with Bert in America for some years, while Marlon was growing up, and they used to go camping together. Marlon says Bert would wake up in the middle of the night, shouting, “Look out, Charlie, here it comes. We’re all goners! We’re all goners! Fuck this shit.”
Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood. The old rhyme commemorates the unchanging character of the place: “Sutton for mutton, Kirkby for beef, South Darne for gingerbread, Dartford for a thief.” Dartford’s big money used to come from sticking up the stagecoach from Dover to London along the old Roman road, Watling Street. East Hill is very steep. Then suddenly you’re in the valley over the River Darent. It’s only a minor stream, but then you’ve got the short High Street and you’ve got to go up West Hill, where the horses would drag. Whichever way you’re coming, it’s the perfect ambush point. The drivers didn’t stop and argue—part of the fare would be the Dartford fine, to keep the journey going smoothly. They’d just toss out a bag of coins. Because if you didn’t pay going down East Hill, they’d signal ahead. One gunshot—he didn’t pay —and they’d stop you at West Hill. So it’s a double stickup. You can’t get out of it. That notion had pretty much stopped when trains and cars took over, so probably