FELIX BRENNAN.

4"London." Slums, murder of Mary Jones and other events.   ( Out of sight out of mind).

      Unfortunately, as it turned out, I passed the Civil Service Exams, I also passed in the top five percent, which qualified me for a Foreign Department.  So I was given the opportunity to have an interview in London.

In fact I had been at the Wallasey, Technical School, on my one day a week stint, from Cadbury’s. When my mother and Father Evans- Haa, turned up, waiting for me. They had opened my mail from the Civil Service, and inside were my results. I was kind of told that I would have to go down for the interview. I really wasn’t sure of that, for it had never really been my idea to join the Civil Service.  So I had to get ready and go down to London for my interview.  I seemed to do alright in the interview and of course, I didn’t mention my marriage. Some weeks later, I was informed that I was seconded, from the Civil Service, to The Crown Agents on Millbank, right opposite, The Houses of Parliament.  I didn't know whether I should go by myself but my mother and Father Haa Evans thought that I should. They felt I suppose it was an important career move for me. (As it turned out I would have been better off staying at Cadbury's, I would have been promoted and given a council house, and the road to disaster may not have happened.)

     This meant living in a men's hostel in Wandsworth and coming home on weekends, when I could.  I enjoyed the hostel and I met young men from Greece, Spain and Israel.  There were all kinds staying in there, including a very gay couple. An alcoholic Scotsman, an Irish Male Mental Nurse, and a fellow from the Foreign Office even. We even went sight-seeing together and I became very friendly with them, playing soccer and the like.  There was Antonio from Spain, Zvi from Israel and Demetrius from Greece, and a truckie from Newcastle.  We had good fun, going to the coffee bar, listening to the Shadows and music like that.  Unfortunately my rail passes and money ran out and I wasn't there for my daughter's birth. Getting up to Liverpool, without a pass was a great expense, on my boy’s wage.

       Rosetta also named the child after an uncle Jack who had died in circumstances I wasn't told about, but it was suicide, and he was mentally ill.  (Another naming an Irish family would not have done). My sister Therese used to visit Rosetta during the day, when she was wagging school, and her family visited as well, bringing provisions.  She only lived in Birkenhead from May to September 1960. Rosetta and Jacqueline moved to London, where I had found a new slum for us to live in; 93 St.Stephen's Gardens, Paddington.  It was owned by none other than, my benefactor and teacher, the Church.

I saw the room advertised in the paper and followed it up.  On arrival at the address, a woman with a Northern Ireland accent answered the door.  I asked her was she from Belfast and told her my family still lived in Northern Ireland.  Anyway I rented the room and started to paint it out.  My friend ‘Jock’, from the hostel helped me and we painted it all lilac.  I did pay him as well for his time, of course.  We also papered the walls, so it looked not so bad.  I forgotten to check if there was a bathroom, and there was none, only one lavatory for the entire house. 

I picked Rosetta and the baby, Jacqueline, up from train station and we took a taxi home.  She thought the houses looked big and I thought it looked like Harlem.  The houses must have been for the Gentry, in times past, for they were so big.  However these days, they were overcrowded slums.  The other end of the gardens wasn’t as bad as our end, but they all needed demolishing, or renovating.

 Rosetta had a new green suit on and looked quite well, after the birth of the baby.  Although, I did detect a certain coolness or withdrawal about her.  I thought she didn’t like the room, but it seemed to be more than that, and of course it suited her family to be out of town. She had a pram,that her mother had given her, and I had a hideaway bed that had been bought for us, pre bought by Father Evans,  Besides that we had a table and two chairs and that was it.  I managed to buy a cot for the baby, but we had nothing else. 

Our neighbours were a strange lot.  There were another three rooms in our attic/garret level, and they held an assortment.  One was an Australian Lady from Victoria, another was a strange woman, and the other was a family of Gypsies.  Rosetta used to hang out with the Gypsies, even after we moved, for some strange reason. (I didn't have anything against Gypsies per se but these looked rather untidy, to say the least. This resulted in the kids getting nits and head lice and it  caused a lot of problems at the new place). Also my holiday pay and last weeks pay from the Lyons Cafe disappeared as well, and I suspected that they had something to do with cashing the postal orders.The Aussie, as I called her, told us tales about Australia, and said that she wanted to go back someday. Perhaps she could get a free ticket, on the ‘Bring out a Briton’, programme.  She had tales about rats eating her food in Victoria and things like that, she must have come from the Bush.  How she ended up being stuck in London, I don’t know. I spent quite a lot of time chatting with her anyway.  For I had an idea that may be I would like to see Australia, some day. At this time I was buying a packet of Pall Mall cigarettes and a Time magazine, occasionally, so as I could imagine what being an American must be like.  I imagined being in the picture, they always put on the back, with the shiny car and nice house.

 Aussie’s door was right next to the common oven, which was just parked in the middle of the landing.  There were no vents, exhaust hoods, or anything and no doubt it was dangerous. In our rooms we only had gas rings, which we could fry some breakfast on.  Everything was run on a meter and the landlord took another bite again.  The mad woman, used to stand naked at her door, every now and then.  In the meantime she kept much to herself.  The Gypsy family had a big bed in the room and they were always all together on that. As I said  Rosetta used to talk to them a lot, for some reason, and hang out in their room,but I never did.  I think she even lent them some of our meagre resources.  Downstairs there were a few other families.  Directly underneath, there was an Irish couple who used to drink a lot and have parties.  I enjoyed all the music and was familiar with the songs they sang. They never invited us to their parties though, I suppose being so young, people ignored us.  Next to them was a Coloured family from somewhere, and they had no sheets.  So I lent them some that we had been given, as a wedding present. There was another Irish couple downstairs, and they got to use the rent collector’s bathroom, as she was Irish also.  There was a nice girl named Mary Jones, and she came from Wales, and had been a nurse at some time, (she was later murdered in the house).  She also used to talk about going out with an American fellow, who was surprised to meet a real life Mary Jones. Rosetta spent a lot of time with her and we got pretty friendly.  So much so, that she offered to exchange rooms with us, when the baby came.  Yes Rosetta was pregnant again, and this was going to be a difficult time.  Two children in a house that really wasn’t fit for ‘travelers and dossers’, never mind families.

       It was a real slum, no bathroom and one toilet for about ten families, we had to bathe at the public bathhouse at Porchester Hall Baths.  Our room was a garret with a cracked window, pane and a small sink, just big enough to bathe the baby in. We were about four flights up rickety stairs, winding stairs, a fire would have been fatal.

The view from the window was of equally depressing and squalid tenements.  The slums were very near the church though and processions used to come around the streets. Even after all this I still attended Mass, occasionally, I suppose I was trying to get close to 'God' or something. We survived here in very tight circumstances, for I was only on a boy's pay and the extortionate rent took two thirds of my wage. My pay was six pounds weekly, as an underage junior, and the rent was four pounds, so we went hungry to feed the child.  I was in a Government Department so I was supposed to be living at home, and not be supporting a family, and London was super expensive. If we had stayed on Merseyside, we would have been able to get a council house and live better, but the pressure from my mother and Father Evans -Haa to take the London job worked on my mind. May be they felt it was better for me to take the London job as it was more prestigious than working a local Civil Service Office. I often had to walk from Paddington to Westminster on an empty stomach. I can remember eating only bread, onions plus some Christmas cake, and other goodies, we had been sent, one particular entire month! I wasn't upset, I wasn't feeling sorry for myself, I just accepted the situation.  In fact our Christmas Day was a bottle of cheap white wine and a scrawny cheap chicken..My saving grace was the Civil Service Lunch vouchers, they didn’t buy me lunch but I could get a bowl of soup and a brown roll, for their value; one shilling and one penny!  13p. This got me through the day, and allowed Rhi to use the other meagre rations and buy milk formula for the baby.

       The room was cold and heated by a gas fire, in a bad state of repair, which voraciously ate money, through a one shilling, gas meter.  The meter was set at a level so that the money lasted only a short time; So the money went to the landlord, and I didn’t know whether this was a middle man or the Church itself.  Rosetta was having some problems here as well, like leaving nappies under the sink until they turned black, hidden behind small curtains.  She was of course in a state of depression again and this was a symptom, of a deteriorating mental condition. At seventeen I couldn't understand what was happening, and I felt she was lazy and doing all this on purpose.  An old Gibraltarian woman, named Senora Wink helped us a lot during this time, otherwise Rosetta wouldn't have coped. Senora Wink lived in a closet, on the landing by the toilet.  It held a single bed of sorts and that was all, the bed took the whole space up.  How she stood it, I don’t know for it was by the toilet, which used to stink and was often blocked up, by all the drunks shitting in there.   Her son Angel had moved to London and married an English girl, and they lived in another room in the house. She spent a lot of time with Rosetta and looked after the baby.  I think she realised that something was wrong with Rosetta. I worked for the Civil Service, so I carried messages to the Colonial Office for her, for we had internal phone lines.  She eventually got a free pass back to Gibraltar.

        One day I met some old school kids from my Catholic Primary, Tommy Gosson, who my mother said was a "scruffy boy". (When I was younger I was always bringing "poor boys" home to be fed and entertained, even though we weren't that well off ourselves.)

       With Tommy was Bernadette Bassnet , who was now a prostitute. She had another girl with her also a prostitute. I talked with them for a while and told them my story so far. A few days later Tommy invited me to meet his girlfriend.  We traveled a long way to North London and then walked for miles along dark streets.  I was getting very worried and I could see Tommy had something in his pocket, for he kept his hand on it all the time.  I don't mind admitting I was nervous for I had recognised them and why am I miles away from home?   Eventually I decided to go home.  So Tommy showed me any house, and said his girlfriend lived there, but wasn't home.  I rushed home and sure enough the girls had been there, trying to recruit Rosetta, as a prostitute, and they had robbed the gas meters for good measure. I thought there was some irony in that, as the money went to Catholic girls, and the slums were owned by the Church. They used bring their processions around sometimes, around the slums they owned, so people could see their holiness.  I knew that I had been in danger that night, for my own feelings told me so, but what protected me was the fact that I had befriended Tommy when he was a little boy.

       So many a night was spent huddled in blankets, in order to keep warm. Even the one pane of glass in the window with a big crack in it was never fixed.  No repairs were ever done, by the manager of the house. Eventually Rosetta got a part-time job in Jimmy James's grocery, on Westbourne Grove, for two pound fifty a week. She seemed very happy with her job for it was something she was trained to do and could do. So we now could afford to buy a radio, as I was getting some overtime, at work as well.  We were moving up, perhaps one day a television.  I'm afraid we spent many a night in our blankets listening to the radio, in our dark and cold room.  During this period I suffered from terrible stomach trouble and bad skin.  Sometimes I would double up in pain on the floor.  Stress and unhygenic conditions were probably the cause, and I was still only a teenager. The baby, Jackie, did fine and she walked at nine-months, due to her own precociousness and the fact the room was small. Even here in these circumstances we found people who were worse off than we were, so we lent or rather gave them stuff.  I often used to dream of having a big, ground floor, bed-sitting, room, with big windows, a separate kitchen and even a little common yard, in the front.  In those days, I couldn’t see any further than living in rented room.  A rented apartment, was for the rich, and a house was beyond my imagination.

The Northern Irish lady, obviously was connected to the Church. She had all the privileges, such as a bathroom and a back garden, but all of this was off limits to the other tenants. Even when Rosetta had our second child at home, which was a horrific and noisy experience, we were not allowed to use the bathroom.  I attended the beginning of the birth, I saw the baby’s head for a second, but then the nurses told me to leave.  The landlady took me down in the back garden, and kept me busy, whilst the sounds of screaming came from the open window. Rosetta was screaming like mad, but eventually it stopped, and I went up to the room, to view the new baby.  I even went to buy some bacon and eggs, to give to the nurses, but they couldn’t stay very long.  I told them we always had bacon and eggs, which was a lie. We hadn’t had that since we moved into the slum.  They seemed very sad for us, not happy.  I suppose it was because we were still only eighteen and now had two children.  The attending nurses Stella and Anne had to use our little sink and take a bag of afterbirth with them.  For the toilet was blocked again, upstairs. I was so impressed and grateful that we named the little girl after them, Stella  Anne.  Stella was a scrawny baby with black hair, and no wonder considering the starvation diet we were on, until recently.

       We were very lucky to have the downstairs room for our friend, Mary Jones had swapped with us. She had gone up to our fourth floor garret and we had moved down to her ground floor squalor, but we were very grateful all the same, ( She was later murdered in the house).The room had an oven inside, not sharing outside on the landing. During this time Rosetta didn't handle life very well either, she was extremely morose and didn't wash the baby’s nappies or clean up. In retrospect she was probably suffering from at least depression and complications, from an existing mental condition.

We did go home one Christmas, after we moved to Westbourne Grove, and we chose to go by ‘Danair’ which was using cheap planes and a fare of 5pounds...The seats were canvas and there was not a lot of room. Rosetta surprised me by being sick and then totally freaking out, upsetting the hostesses as well...I didn’t understand why she did this but it was the first time she had flown, and I had given her the window seat so she could watch the take-off . This apparently scared her but the babies were fine.. We returned to London on the train!!!! I should have made a note of this ‘freak-out’ but didn’t think anymore about it other than first flight jitters...

 "Experiences in London."