Stan’s silvertongued recollections

He has been a Basildon ratepayer for 44 years, but his childhood was spent in a different place and a different world.

Like so many thousands of others who now think of themselves as Essex folk, Stan’s roots lie in the old East End of London. If he climbs nearby Langdon Hills on a clear day he can even gain a view of the old country.

However, the East End of Stan’s boyhood has vanished. More of the spirit probably survives in Basildon than in Silvertown, where Stan grew up.

“Both my neighbours in Laindon lived just a mile away from me in Silvertown and one of them also attended my school,” Stan says.

As with all who have migrated to a different land, the Silvertowners keep alive the folk memory of the home country. Eventually, Stan decided to put his own recollections on paper.

Stan says: “I started in 2004, both as a record of what great times it was for kids in Silvertown in the Forties and Fifties, and also to save myself repeatedly telling the same stories to my grandkids.”

As so often with memoirs, something intended as a light, brief reminiscence turned into a magnum opus.

“I started off intending to do just a few sheets of A4 and sort of got carried away. I ended up with 90 pages,” he says.

He put these recollections on to the internet, intending to share memories with a few others from the old days.

What happened then was an extraordinary testimony to the enduring power of the old East End in the hearts of those who knew it, as well as Stan’s skill at re-evoking it.

“I started to get messages from all over the place, including Australia and the USA,” Stan says. “People were asking where they could buy the material as a book.

“I said they could just print it out from the internet for nothing, but they all said, ‘no’. They wanted a real book.” That ‘real book’ is now available under the title Silvertown Life – a Boy’s Story.

You can see why so many people wanted Stan’s story to be published.

Stan is a natural writer with a rare ability to capture human warmth – and warmth was what old London exuded.

The generosity and openness of that world are still talked about whimsically in Basildon. Typical was the reaction of Stan’s mum in 1944, when a neighbouring family, the Butterbees, came knocking at her door.

The Butterbees had been bombed out of their home. Unhesitatingly, Stan’s mum gave them possession of the top floor of the house, and they became permanent residents until rehoused in the 1950s.

It was, above all, a wonderful time to be a boy.

Health and safety concerns were non-existent. Stan recalls long battles between himself and his friends involving water pistols on one side, and red-hot pokers straight from the fire on the other.

Post-war, bombed-out London may have seemed a grim place to adult eyes, but for children it was a giant adventure playground.

Gangs of boys played happily in the ruins of blitzed houses.

“We’d leap across joists on the first floor of the house where the floor boards, or ceilings, used to be,” he recalls.

Most hair-raising of all were the docksides. The lads would swing out over the Thames on mooring-ropes used to tie ships and barges to the jetties.

They did so in full knowledge that “one slip in the wrong direction and you would be dunked in the Thames and immediately swept off by the strong currents under the barges to a swift and certain death.”

Dicing with death was part of the excitement, however, one denied to cotton-wool-wrapped modern kids.

Stan and his friends all lived to tell tales of their boyhood. You understand what he means when he talks about “what great times it was for kids in Silvertown”.

Boredom simply played no part in a child’s life. There was always something to do or investigate. You could dig old bottles out of the Thameside mud, explore the contents of lorries while the drivers were having their lunch, swap comics, or stop off for a penny glass of Tizer at the provisions shop operated by the Hobbs sisters, You could spend hours mesmerised by shower of sparks thrown out by the travelling knife-sharpener at work with his whetstone.

A penny would buy you a ride on the rickety, hand-cranked roundabout towed round the streets by a horse and operated by Gipsy Leo, the ragman.

Collectors could cadge colourful matchboxes and foreign coins from seamen coming off the ships. Hunting and shooting opportunities were provided by the local flies.

Thanks to the animal carcasses piled up in the local soap factory “there were bluebottles almost the size of small birds on the walls.”

Anybody could squash them with a rolled-up newspaper. The skill was to hit them with a rubberband ball, fired from a slingshot, so the bluebottle exploded against the wall “like a paintball.”

If these pleasures palled, there were always street games. With few vehicles around, Silvertown streets seemed to have been one big playground.

Organised games like Knock Down Ginger, Tin Tan Tommy, Jimmy Knacker One Two Three, and British Bulldog were constantly on the go.

Childhood segued into a time when girls became something more than just playmates.

Stan gives a hilarious account of how an early and pretty innocent experiment looking at girls “bits” was disrupted by the girl’s elder sister. With enraged mums in hot pursuit, and a car commandeered for the chase, Stan and his equally wicked friend found themselves the quarry of a manhunt that took them all the way to North Woolwich. Proper girlfriends followed, and places like the old Woolwich Granada cinema, the Tate and Lyle social club, and the No 669 bus provide an oddly romantic background – or maybe it is just Stan’s ability to transform ordinary, universal experiences into gold on the page.

As Stan reached his coming of age, as boyhood pleasures were forgotten, and girls and fashion became the focus of life, Silvertown was also changing.

The gradual evolution into the world of today is summed up in the account of the day in 1957 when the Dyson family exchanged their old Bakelite radio for a new television.

In 1961 they moved out of the old family home in Westwood Road as part of a slum clearance programme.

By now, Stan had met his wife-to-be, Joan, and they were married in 1963.

The final pages describe Stan and Joan’s departure from their beloved Silvertown when a new job and home took them to Essex.

Hopefully, though, Stan will use his literary powers in a second volume about life in the early days of Basildon New Town. As with tens of thousands of other Londoners, the move east to Essex was, in theory at least, a huge improvement in lifestyle for Stan and Joan. Much of the world they left behind was officially described as slum.

It was a childhood and youth devoid of flash cars, plazma TV screens and foreign holidays.

The East End streets had their pains as well as pleasures. The streets stank from the smell of dead animals in the soap factory. Poor dietary knowledge meant, on several occasions, young Stan ended up in a children’s convalescent home.

A seemingly endless line-up of dodgy vicars and other perverts did their best to touch up the boys.

Yet without even being aware of it, Silvertown folk enjoyed a richness of life and relationships we can only envy.

Silvertown was a magical place, and you can see why Stan prefaces his book with A E Houseman’s famous Blue Remembered Hills.

“That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. Those happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.”

l Silvertown Life, by Stan Dyson, is published by Authorhouse. ISBN 978-1-4343-9088 and 9099