My East End. Memories of Life in Cockney London

by George Μ. Chatzistergiou

"My childhood was part of a world that no longer exists today...In the streets there were carts and old trams that threw out sparks...This world consisted of the family along with neighbours and children playing outside in the street calling all women in the neighbourhood "aunt", regardless of their real degree of kinship... Women got married very young, had many children and looked old before they even reach forty...But it was they who were in charge of the house and the neighbourhood...In the summer nights they would sit on a kitchen chair outside at the street talking and laughing..." What is this about? Is it Metaxurgio, Votanikos or Patissia at the beginning of the 1950s?

The description below refers explicitly to the first postwar decades: "then began the mass demolition of old houses. The hovels disappeared and gave their place to tall buildings... Many people moved to distant areas so as to find a job. This is how neighbourhoods were ruined... The feeling of "community" no longer existed since you did not know for sure who the person next door was..." However, even though there are remarkable similarities, this is neither Metaxurgio nor a greek provincial town of an earlier age. This is about East End, the large working area of London during the '40s, '50s and '60s. After the enormous success of Frank Mc Court's sensational book "Angela’s Ashes” and the homonymous film, there are many books being published currently in Britain that refer to the way of life of the society "when we were children" and mainly concern economically downgraded districts of London or other cities of the United Kingdom. Of course, East End is not a ordinary area. It has a top spot at the mythology of "popular London", as the area where Jack the Ripper and the first anarchists took action as well as the birthplace of celebrities such as Harold Pinter or Vidal Sassoοn. It is also the area where in 1936 tens of thousands of inhabitants decisively faced the black shirts of the english fascist party when they tried to hold an intimidating parade at the jewish district... The archetypal image of East End derives from the description of a writer of the Victorian era, that is the second half of the 19^th century : "East End is poverty's hell. This area supplies but also surrounds, with its geographic proximity, the welfare and wealth of City and West End..."

Gilda O' Neill's book begins with a retrospection of the way the city of London evolved and of how its east end near the river Thames was gradually populated by workers who worked at the harbour. It was the Industrial Revolution that brought enormous economic prosperity to London and along with it came a great increase of workers living in East End. The condition changed after World War II, when the British were sent away from their colonies which in combination with the radical technical changes in commercial navigation brought decline to the once noisy docks of Thames. However, despite the "apparent retreat", a new wind was blowing, in the frame of social realignments in international level. The postwar era was marked by unprecedented changes in Britain, with the gradual shrinkage of the working class and the consequent urbanization of a large part of it. As described by the "Guardian"s reporter Polly Toynbee in her book “Hard Work, Life in low-pay Britain” (Bloomsbury, 2003): "All around us, the children of workers have taken part in processes of social ascent and new jobs have been turning up everywhere in the field of services..." A social earthquake in development has lifted a great part of my generation much above our parent's income, education and expectations... This was the '60s boom which was combinated with the total domination of the ideology of the incessable social progress..."

Of course, the intense social mobility was combined with respective mobility concerning the places of work and stay. Within a few decades the social web of East End of, for example, the '50s belonged to the past. The constantly depilated population of the old inhabitants that still live in the area is living in surroundings that no longer remind of the "old times". It's typical that, as Gilda O’ Neill points out, not even the children of the "old" inhabitants do not remind of the "old times". The country's unified educational system, for example, has eliminated completely the old famous linguistic idiom "cockney" of popular London. The linguistic resemblance regardless of the class descent of the English, Bernard Shaw's main idea in the famous musical "My Fair Lady", finally appears to be true.

On the other hand, there is some importance to the fact that the East End keeps -even today- its character as a "slum area". During the last decades foreign economic immigrants have been swarming there in waves and it is typical that one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods is now called Bangla Town, named after Bangla Desh, the country of origin of its inhabitants today. The new community has its own way of life and even its own contribution to the central literary scene of Britain. For example, Monica Ali's book entitled “Brick Lane” (Doubleday, 2003) has caused a sensation and is for months at the top spots of the "best sellers". It refers to Nazneen's life, who was born in Bangla Desh in 1967 and came to East End in order to marry someone through a "match". Through correspondence with her sister who is still living in Bangla Desh appear all the differencies and common parts of life in two different cultural environments.

Back to O’ Neill's “East End”, the author gives a detailed account of all the phases of life of the area but does not hide her preferences: her emotion and nostalgia for the "old way of life" is so intense that the main part of her book has to do with its representation. Gilda O’ Neill is indeed suitable for this task. She made a name for herself as an author by writing somewhat light sentimental stories that took place precisely at the "old" East End. For her most mature work, the book in question, she has had to develop her manner, even using techniques of the mythology of oral history. The result of her work as "a document of a way of life" has received aknowledgement by the reliable publishing house Penguin that has undertaken the publication of the book. It is the kind of books that "put flesh to the bones of economists and sociologists" (Economist) and at the same time "make us see with a fresh eye the image of modern cities" (Observer).

The book appears interesting to the greek reader for various reasons. First of all, "East End" touches a delicate chord to anyone who looks back at the past and his own family stories with nostalgia. Beyond its recreational side, this has an unexpected importance to anyone who studies the postwar greek society. The descriptions of the "lost paradises" are so alike, in respect to what our cities used to be and now are not, so that they vividly emphasize on the community of social experiences. There is no doubt that postwar Greece had a completely different economic starting-point, class structure and cultural past in comparison to Britain. However, the similarity between the ways of living through important developments -at least for some areas of the two countries- refers to a common reference frame even if under certain conditions. It is about the great changes and the radical discontinuities that characterize today's era and always in relation to the place that each country holds in the postwar global economic and social system. Focus on the similarities between the greek society and the others surrounding us as well as emphasis on our true differences, helps our collective self-knowledge. Refering to everything as an abstracted "greek peculiarity" perpetuates confusion and therefore practically prevents us from intervening positively on the developments.

Gilda O’ Neill

My East End. Memories of Life in Cockney London.

Penguin, 2002, pp.322