Cockney Girl

Cockney Girl is a second-generation Jewish-British child’s eyewitness account of tumultuous East London and her eccentric family in England 1934-1950. The writer was then aged 5-20. This zeitgeist, before, during and after World War two, is based on memories and diaries and is, according to ElieWiesel, ‘unmapped history’. Both cockneys, friend Joycey Kennel and I, roamed East London most Saturdays while my operaphile mother set and permed ladies hair and my deaf, barber father, shaved dockers for pub nights and Christmas. One Christmas, Mummy dropped me, aged five, at a Dickensian orphanage for two years, I joyously returned to sooty East London witnessing the 600,000 Fascist - Anti-Fascist 1936 Cable Street Battle and was bridesmaid at aunt Mitzi’s posh wedding. In 1939, London children were hastily evacuated from expected Nazi bombing to country foster parents who ranged fromkind to concupiscent.When I was 14,Mummy sent me to The White House Jewish refugee orphanage: Great Chesterford. Here, contemporaneously with Anne Frank, aged 15, I began my diary, rejoined the tribe and, while a teenager, met Yank servicemen and wounded British soldiers. With peace, aged 16, I returned home, a stranger, attended LSE and immigrated to America, but remained a Cockney Girl.