East Ham In The 1960s

A Memory of East Ham.

In February 1963, when I was six and a half, my parents bought their first house, in Thorpe Road, East Ham. It was and had been a very cold winter, and when we moved in we had difficulty opening the back door, as there was so much snow.
Across the road, on the corner, was a small supermarket called Foodtown, which later became Tesco.
At first, our house had no central heating, no double glazing, and no bathroom, and we had an outside toilet. A few years later, my father installed storage heaters, had trendy new louvre windows fitted, and brought the toilet indoors by knocking down walls and converting the downstairs pantry into a bathroom: the window looked directly onto the garden shed, literally inches away.
I had been born in Forest Gate Hospital, and we had lived with relatives before renting flats in Canning Town (above a greengrocers) and Upton Park (Thorngrove Road). I had briefly attended Upton Cross Infants School, but now I went to the much more modern Altmore Infants School, where the headmistress was Miss Northcot, and my teacher was Mrs Morrison, who didn't approve of the Beatles because of their "long hair".
I remember going with my mother to Safeway, a big supermarket (for the time) in the High Street, in which was a cafe. Having no freezer at home, I used to take one of the yogurts from the chilled cabinet and hide it in one of the supermarket freezers, and when we went back I'd collect it and we'd buy it--I did love frozen yogurt!
I remember many of the shops in the High Street: WH Smith, the dairy shop, C&A, Woolworth, and the little kiosk, run by a man called Lionel, where Dad used to buy his tobacco on a Friday on his way home from work.
I remember the shops in Green Street, too: the home-made sweet shop, where you could look in the window and see the sweets being made; a grocer's shop, run by Chinese men; Lewis's (later Chieseman's), the department store, which we used to visit just so I could have a ride on Muffin the Mule, one of those penny ride machines; Caters, where the floor was covered in sawdust, and where you could buy brown or white eggs and broken biscuits, as well as cheese cut to order, and bacon and cold meats sliced off the bone. There was an aroma about the place that for me epitomised Saturday afternoons, for it was on Saturdays that I was usually there with Mum, visiting my maternal grandparents in nearby Woodstock Road; many of Mum's side of the family lived in that street at one time or another, including both sets of her grandparents.
My father, a West Ham United fan, took me to see the victory parade after the team won the European Cup Winners Cup; another memorable trip with Dad was to the East Ham Town Show, where I had my photo taken with a "life size" model Dalek, as Doctor Who had just started.
My mother and I sometimes went to East Ham market, but she preferred the larger Queens Road market, off Green Street.
My paternal grandparents lived in Boundary Road, at the Boleyn, and on a Sunday morning Dad and I would visit them, walking along the Barking Road with the smells of various Sunday roasts permeating the air. My grandparents actually had a telephone, and one morning while we were there, my mother called from a phone box to say that our chimney was on fire. I was left at my grandparents' while Dad ran all the way home!
Until we had our own bathroom, we would go to my grandparents' every Friday to have a bath; my other grandparents, in Woodstock Road, never had a bathroom.
I went to Napier Road Junior School until I was kept in one lunchtime for detention; I'd been due to go home for dinner, and naturally Mum was worried, so she came to the school, and the ensuing row with my teacher resulted in my being taken out of the school and enrolling at Lathom Road Juniors instead.
Like most of the children in my class, I passed the 11-Plus, and I went to East Ham Grammar School for Girls. My Dad worked nextdoor, at Edwin Phillips Blinds & Shutters; the building is now derelict.