The Harding family

Monolingual Voices in a Multilingual City

THE HARDING FAMILY

Our second family, from Short Street, are the Harding Family, who span the longest time living in this or the adjacent street. The oldest generation comprises James, born in 1937 and Mary, born in 1944. James can remember living in the area during the war, when the houses in Short Street were bombed and Mary, who came from adjacent Canning Town, remembers the bomb damage there before their own house was built. Their daughter, Lisa, was born in 1967 and lives in an adjacent street where she had her daughter, Nicky, who is of mixed race, in 1996. The youngest member of the family and of the whole group, is Nicky’s son who was born in 2019 and is called Bear. Mary expects to take an active role in caring for Bear, since her job is part-time.

Click on the participant, child and grandchild links to listen to extracts from their interviews.

Transcript

James: I seen blokes get killed down the docks just like that. I was talking to a bloke on the dock one day and we was on the bottom tier and somebody dropped a big crane load and it come down and I just walked away and it all went on top of him, just like that.

Mary: Yeah cos it wasn’t like today where everything’s all safety control, health and safety…

James: No when you worked you worked.

Eve: Did you work all your life?

James: Oh yeah I worked till I come out the dock and I went to do the job what I used to do.

Mary: He went down the council

James: That’s what I used to do. My dad was a dockie, he was a crane driver down the dock so he got me in the dock.

Eve: So what did you learn to do?

James: I learnt winching, but I never done the cranes, but you was pretty well known when you do a job down there, you had the gangs, the certain things they used to do, people knew that gang and that was it. If they wanted a special job, then they’d go and get that gang.

Mary: Half the time we used to say ‘Stand on the stones ’ and I thought there was all these big stones and they’d get the jobs but if he is… he never got a lot of jobs. His dad did, cos his dad was a drinker. He used to buy other people pints to get a job. Nine times out of ten he never got no job cos he wouldn’t do that. He said, ‘If they don’t want me for my work… and I don’t drink,’ so.. do you know what I mean? A lot of times you daren’t come home..

James: I been on the ship Christmas time, there’s been like twelve blokes in the gang and there’s two of us at the end of the day working, the rest was all drunk

Eve: I know cos one of my uncles was a docker.

Mary: He wasn’t the typical docker really.

James: I didn’t drink, so at the end of the day, when…

Mary: His dad used to… his dad used to say to him, ‘Don’t tell your mother how much I earn cos then they wouldn’t …… a man was a man. We never done that, we always pulled together.