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Helen and John Lyndon


"The big trouble where I lived in Grove Road, unfortunately we had wooden shutters on the windows…Mosley’s fascists used to walk from near Mile End station right the way down Grove Road accompanied by as many policemen as there were, wherever there was trouble the police protected them, everybody else was one, sort of the wrong ones, I think it could’ve been very easy for this country to have turned, with Germany, how it didn’t I’, I think it was a miracle because it was on the cards, uh, we used to have thrown, stones thrown at the, the windows but of course the shutters were up and I was never allowed out at certain times at the weekend because it was dangerous because they, was, was nothing of picking up, picking up the Jewish child and just throwing them around the place, I suffered a lot of anti-semitism in the school ‘cause three Jewish boys and four hundred and there is a story which I don’t need to relate, it’s just one of the things that goes on." 

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" So it’s changed quite a lot…there were Jewish, um, shops, we had a kosher butcher here…there was a delicatessen here, the hairdresser was owned by a Jewish girl, the fishmonger sold Jewish type fish so it was a really, a proper Jewish area "

"The only reason, uh, I, there’s a big gap in the middle where, um, the only reason I understand Yiddish and speak a bit is because my Bubba [Yiddish for grandmother] God rest her soul….couldn’t speak English and likewise my parents, if they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying or what they were talking about they would speak in Yiddish and my bubba god rest her if, um, she spoke to us, she spoke to us in Yiddish and if we spoke to her in English she answered in Yiddish. "

"Um,  I think that’s about it.  I was quite, um, a tomboy when I was a, before the war broke out when I was a kid because I was the only girl for quite a while, my cousins were boys and obviously my brother, until a girl cousin was born quite, a little bit later…so I was a tomboy and we lived in Hackney… opposite London Fields that is the place where we were bombed out of our home.  Then I don't think as children we were really scared or frightened it was more, more a sort of a game during the war years. We learnt to mix with country people,  country people were basically surprised that Jewish children looked the same as non-Jewish children."

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