Chapter 1
The Past is Mine
Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde.
It was an inauspicious beginning, the day that I was born the 28 December 1929,. My father was lying in bed in the next room fighting smallpox, never having been vaccinated against the dread disease. My mother was giving birth to me, her sixth child in the next room, aided manfully by a midwife. I had come as a complete surprise, two months too early. I was puny, but obviously just as eager to face the world as I still am. “What’ll I call her, nurse?” After four previous children, my mother had exhausted her stock of names. She was weary of giving birth now, worried and anxious as to how she would feed another mouth. The nurse cast her mind around, equally weary after the ordeal. “Well, Sylvia Sims is very popular now. So why don’t you call her ‘Sylvia’?” And Sylvia, it was, although I have always hated the name...
This momentous event took place in a flat in West Ham, an area near Epping Forest, which had been very wealthy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Merchant bankers and city magnates had built their large and important country houses there. But by the end of the nineteenth century with the arrival of the docks, the railways and other industrial enterprises, and the phenomenal rise in the population (from 18,000 in 1851 to 205.000 in 189I); the other side of industrialization was clearly to be seen. West Ham’s main claims to fame by the end of the century was to elect Keir Hardie as the very first Labour M.P. to sit in the House of Commons, and to have provided the newspapers with some excitement when a factory manufacturing T.N.T. in Silvertown blew up in 1917 killing sixty-nine employees. Now, the grand houses still remaining are very popular with the large Asian families who have moved into the area. They appreciate their spacious rooms.
By 1929 the area had improved considerably, but was still highly impoverished and with much sub-standard housing. We lived in what was colloquially known as ‘The Buildings’, those solid blocks of flats, five storeys high, reminiscent of the substantial blocks still part of the city-scape in Europe. I’ve often wondered why most of them have disappeared; some were obviously bombed, but others were torn down in the manic rebuilding of London after the Second World War, to be replaced by the hated high-rise flats. These pre-war blocks were built on a human scale, still low enough to be friendly and welcoming. They could have been as successful as the European ones, except that in our part of London, the poorest and the lowest of society inhabited them. I’m told we lived on the third floor. Each flat consisted of a living room, a small kitchen and three bedrooms, which may sound fairly spacious, but one of the bedrooms was let out to a lodger to help pay the rent. The rest of the family, ten in all, slept in the other two. For me, only the street outside was real. The street was our playground and our battlefield. Unlike the carefully cosseted and protected middle-class girls who played in the security of their gardens, we had no gardens. We played on the pavements outside, shouting and giggling raucously at each other, unconsciously developing useful aggressive instincts as we vied with e
