58 S MAGAZINE ★ 4 AUGUST 2019
INTERVIEW
Regent’s Park and on my way to
Broadcasting House every day.
Seeing my mum with the
washing on the line brings back
memories of the smell of fresh
laundry and her hanging up the
clothes with pegs. Mum has got
a big smile on her face as she’s
looking down on her little boy.
I adored her.”Robert’s book, London Made Us:
A Memoir Of A Shape Shifting City
(Cannongate, £16.99), is out now.
See Express Bookshop on page 77.rather as a great-looking young
woman. We sometimes forget that
our parents were once young and
vivacious, and this picture really
brings that home to me.
That little tricycle I’m sitting on:
I always had a bicycle and after my
brother had a narrow escape when
he went under a bus on his bike,
Mum used to worry whenever she
saw me on mine. ‘Oh Robert,’
she’d cry. She was convinced I
would die on my bicycle. But I still
cycle regularly – I’m one of those
boys in Lycra shorts cycling aroundMarble Arch expecting to see the
Odeon cinema that had been a big
part of my childhood memories.
Not only had the cinema gone, but
so had the whole building.
My dad, Albert, was a steel
worker on constructions such
as the Royal Festival Hall and
the Post Office Tower, and he
would sit on a girder right at the
top of the building eating his
sandwiches. He died aged 41
when he had a heart attack out of
the blue. I was only six years old.
With three young children to
bring up – me being the youngest- Mum gave up working on the
buses and took on three jobs: in
Woolworths, cleaning the officers’
accommodation at RAF Hendon
and looking after other people’s
children in the evening. It was an
extraordinary life. I heard her
crying at night after Dad died, but
she always remained positive.
Despite the fact that we came
from a council estate, both my
parents made us believe that we
should never feel inferior to
others: we were as good as
anybody else. She was proud of
my dad’s work and of what her
children had achieved.
Towards the end of her life in
2011, she became old and frail;
she broke her hip and never came
out of University College Hospital
in Euston where she died shortly
before her 85th birthday. We
knew she was dying. Feeling very
sad, I went outside for some air
and mourned her demise along
Tottenham Court Road where
I burst into tears outside a lap
dancing club of all places.
I look at this picture and don’t
see her as an old woman, but
My favourite photograph by
broadcaster Robert Elms
Robert, 60, recalls the love and sacrifices his hard-working mum made for
her children on a London council estate Words by Tony Padman
“I’M very
fond of this
photograph
taken in 1962,
which shows
my mother
Eileen with me,
aged three, in
my nan’s back
garden in White City. It’s special
because my earliest memory is of
being on my tricycle with Mum in
that garden in west London.
We lived in nearby Ladbroke
Grove and moved to an estate in
Burnt Oak at the top of the
Northern Line a few years later.
She was an amazing woman. She
left school at 15 to work as a
clippie first on the old trolley buses
and then the London double-
deckers and she was guiding them
while bombs were falling over
London during the Blitz of 1941.
Buses became a big part of our
lives. I remember standing at the
bus stop under my mum’s coat
trying to keep warm. There were
no timetables then: you just
waited for the bus to arrive.
We’d travel all over London and
she knew all the drivers and
conductors. My parents were
responsible for my love of London.
We enjoyed going to the cinema
as a family and would just turn
up even if the film was halfway
through, it didn’t matter because
we’d wait for the next screening.
We’d take the number 52 bus to
the Odeon Marble Arch to watch
films like Mary Poppins and Doctor
Zhivago, and then Mum and Dad
would have an argument as she
told him how much she liked Omar
Sharif. A few years ago, I was on a
bus coming around that corner at●SSHUTTERSTOCk