“Cockney
Girl” relates my tumultuous life, 1934-1945, aged 5-16 beginning in
rowdy bawdy gas-lit East London when I was five, ending in 1945 World
War II peace when I was 16. Eight chapters of Cockney Girl have been
published as articles or stories.
This
coming of age eye-witness, zeitgeist story relates intimate pre-war
East End scenes of my parent’s Ladies and Gents Hairdressing shop,
frequented by East London's finest dockers and laborers
while outside, the local active Fascist hoodlums parade and smash our
shop windows. Nevertheless, I love the endless variety of East London.
When I was five, my joyful life vanished when Mummy dropped me in a Dickensian orphanage for two years. When
the orphanage closed for child neglect, I joyously returned to East
London witnessing the famous 600,000 participant Fascist-Anti Fascist
“Cable Street Battle” (published in The Iowa Review, 2007), King George
V’s Silver Jubilee
celebration and my wicked aunt Mitzi’s first marriage to a chemist later
blown up in his lab while doing (still) secret war work, leaving Aunt
Mitzi pregnant. With government compensation, she then had the required dowry to marry her real love.
Rumbles of war appeared with battleships bristling with guns in Portsmouth in “The Last Summer of Peace” and with barrage balloons looming over London.
In 1939 we East End London children were sent away from expected blitz
to country foster parents, where I lived with 17 different foster
parents ranging from kind to concupiscent. Mummy
sent weekly letter about the blitz and her war-work in a VD hospital
where she wrote that British condoms were too small for newly arrived
American troops.
I
ended the war aged 14-16, the only British girl in a Jewish refugee
orphanage, where contemporaneously with Anne Frank I began my diary.
There, I found my identity which, however, on my return home after
peace, conflicted so severely with my mother that I secretly applied to
emigrate to American and for post-graduate study at Columbia and later, NYU. I sailed alone from Dover to Manhattan and into a new life.
Fifteen chapters of “Cockney Girl” have been published as stories besides 35 other works. I teach English and sociology at Montgomery College and have a small business.
