During the Blitz and the years between 1940 and 1944, London's East End bore the brunt of the German bombing. Night raids, daylight raids, then the V1 and V2 rockets, the "Doodlebugs", all concentrated on London's Docks and industrial areas.

Most of my family on my mother's side lived in or close to the East End, in Upton Park, Plaistow, East Ham, Barking, Woolwich etc. Dad, Grandad, Uncle Jim and Uncle Stanley worked in the area. Dad also worked for a time in the London Docks and Silvertown.

I'm glad to say they all survived Hitler's bombing. Though there were a few near misses!

In the garden of our own house in East Ham we had an Anderson shelter. I assume we were given one by the Council on account of being a family with a small child and Dad's income being less than £250 a year. The value of a average Anderson shelter to buy if you were better off was between £7 - £10. The shelters were delivered as a kit of parts consisting, I'm told, of 14 different sized sheets of corrugated steel, some curved, some flat, and a quantity of nuts, bolts, washers and brackets. You had to dig a hole in the garden, ideally 4 feet deep, create a stone or concrete base and assemble the little "tin hut", which looked like a tunnel with flat ends. One end had a small door which I think was about 2 feet wide and 4 feet high. The whole thing was 6 feet 6 inches long by 4 feet wide, which was deemed to be sufficient space for a family of six!

Some people had to install their own shelters but probably got neighbours to help. I believe ours was put up for us by the Council men, but Dad probably had to dig the hole himself and then shovel all the earth back over the top when it was finished.

When the German bombers were spotted coming towards London, the Air-raid Siren would sound to warn people to take to the shelters. This could happen at any time day or night. We had our Anderson in the garden, but some people had no garden or shelter of their own, and so had to make for the nearest communal shelter, often brick-built, above ground in the road or on waste ground. Some people living closer to central London even spent the night in Tube stations, sleeping in rows on the platforms.

The Siren made a scary wailing sound that started low and built up to a crescendo. As soon as they heard it the adults would stop what they were doing and start to gather the things they needed to go to the shelter. Candles, matches, warm clothing, torch, blankets etc., were all kept handy anyway. After checking the fire in the grate was safe and turning off any lights, Dad would wrap me in a blanket and we would all troop down to the Anderson for a few hours or even the rest of the night.

Dad had scrounged some timber (vary scarce in wartime) and made some narrow bunks either side of the tiny space and we shut ourselves in wait to out the bombing and sleep as best we could. I suppose I slept as only a child can despite the noise of planes, bombs and anti-aircraft guns, to say nothing of the damp and the cold and the dank earthy smell of the place. Everyone was relieved when the noise died down and the siren eventually sounded the "All Clear".

As we all climbed out the first thing we did was look to see if our house was still standing. Sometimes the sky was lit up with distant fires. "Looks like the Docks have copped it tonight!", Dad would say glumly as we stood for a while in the garden before going into the house. Mum would always think of my Nan and Grandad. "Hope Mum's alright!", she would say.

(Some comments on the last post brought back further memories)

My mum used to smoke Turf cigarettes. She only ever bought them in packs of ten. I was delighted because each pack had a "fag card" printed on the back of the slider. Lots of kids had collections of fag cards but most had been obtained before the war as production more or less ceased in 1939. Turf cards were not like the old cards, which were shiny, printed in colour and had lots of information about the picture on the back. The Turf pictures were single sided, mostly printed in blue monochrome, and had to be cut out of the slider with scissors.

I think each set had about 25 or 50 pictures to collect. There were series like "Famous Footballers" etc. The kids with collections of the old coloured cards didn't think much of Turf cards, but sometimes you could con them into doing "swapsies" with a few Turf for a coloured one they had duplicated. They were also OK for playing "fagcards" with, where each of you flicked a card against a wall and whoever got nearest picked up all the cards. This was a juvenile form of gambling and was sometimes played with pennies. Though not often as we rarely carried money.

Mum often sent me to buy her fags at the Tobacconist on the next street corner. There was no problem selling to kids. Sometimes she could only afford two or three, but the man in the shop was happy to break into a pack and sell them singly. He'd pop however many you asked for into a tiny white paper bag. Sometimes Mum had no money at all and I'd have to ask for a couple on the slate. I don't remember being particularly embarrassed by this, it was part of life.
Sometimes I would be sent to a neighbour, "Mum says can she borrow a fag till Dad gets home?"

Dad smoked heavily too. I remember him grumpily shivering and scraping around in the cold ashes in the fireplace on a Sunday morning trying to find a few dogends to make into a roll-up when he'd smoked his last fag the night before and needed a puff to start the day.

When I was about six years old in London's East Ham (Newham now) it was quite normal for me to go off on my own on the bus to Barking to see my lovely Aunt Daisy. She had no children so I was the apple of her eye.

Aunty Daisy and Uncle Pat were both heavy smokers and used to buy Craven 'A' in packets of hundreds. Nevertheless she still collected any decent sized dogends she saw in the gutter at the edge of the road. If ever I was out with her she always kept one eye on the pavement and often said," Look Robert, there's a lovely big one in the gutter by that drainhole. Go and pick it up for me." She would produce an Old Holborn tobacco tin from her handbag and pop it in with all the others she had found.

When the tin was full she would let me sit at the little folding card table in her kitchen and pick open all the fagends and tip out the remains of the tobacco onto a sheet of newspaper. Once I'd picked out the burnt black bits and fluffed up the pile between my fingers she would get out her little cigarette machine and a packet of Rizla papers and let me make a whole load of new fags using the little machine to roll the paper round the tobacco and licking the sticky edge just before rolling it inside. We'd never heard of hygiene!

I was no stranger to the gutter. Since most adults smoked, believing the practice to be not only sophisticated but positively beneficial to the health, and since the throwing of litter in the streets was perfectly acceptable so long as you aimed it at the gutter to make it easier for the army of road sweepers to gather it up, the gutter was a treasure trove for collectors of empty fag packets and match boxes such as me.

Mundane examples of Weights, Woodbines, Players and Senior Service were ten-a-penny but there were a few rare gems which were always exciting to find such as the beautifully colourful Passing Cloud. I kept my collection in a large cardboard box which I frequently got out to impress my friends or negotiate "swapsies" with other collectors.

Everyone collected something. Comics, fag cards, marbles, tin soldiers (actually made of lead), bus tickets, bottle tops, the list was endless. We made our own entertainment in those days.

As a child in wartime East London I learned lots of swear words but also learnt that only grownups are allowed to say them. Every time grownups spoke they said things like Christ Almighty! Fornicating Sod! Sod off! Arse'oles! Bugger it! Fornicating seemed to be my mother's favourite word. She used it a lot when referring to my father.

I used to love listening to Uncle Stan's wireless at Nan's, or Aunty Daisy's wireless whenever I went to Barking to see her. I remember Vera Lynn singing "There'll be Blue Birds Over, the White Cliffs of Dover ..." and Tommy Handley in ITMA, "It's that Man Again, it's that Man Again ..."

At Aunt Daisy's it was always nice and warm and if you went there on a Sunday you could sit on a comfortable leather armchair and listen to Two-Way Forces Favourites and smell the dinner cooking. Aunty Daisy always cooked lovely hot dinners swimming in gravy, very tasty and served up on willow pattern plates. Much better than Mum's cooking, which was always cold by the time you got it after all the fiddling about swapping bits of potato and carrots and peas
from one plate to another to even things out.

Mum told me stories about when she was a child my grandmother would send her to the greengrocer late on a Saturday night with a farthing to buy a bag of Specks, a carrier bag full of leftover fruit and vegetables which were slightly damaged and would otherwise have been thrown away. She also told me my grandfather had been a bookie's runner and sometimes came home with the money he had collected to count it and would cover the kitchen table with gold sovereigns. I was never sure how true that was, but as poor as we were, it was lovely to imagine it!

During the war I think my whole family were obsessed with constipation and determined to avoid it at all costs. Every Friday night my brothers and sister and I joined Mum and Dad in the ritual taking of a dose of Brooklax to "keep us regular" whether we needed it or not. Brooklax was a laxative which came in the form of a miniature bar of chocolate. Mum would line us up and poke half a tiny square on each of our tongues. It tasted chocolatey and was actually quite a treat.

The other "medicine" she doled out at the same time was Cod Liver Oil and Malt, and Scotts Emulsion. The first came in a large jar and Mum would stick a dessert spoon into the thick brown tar-like goo and wind it up until a massive dollop formed and shove it into our open mouths. You had to hold the spoon and lick it clean before handing it back for the next dose. The Cod Liver Oil and Malt didn't taste too bad but the next one, Scotts Emulsion, was ghastly. It was an off-white thick liquid poured from a large bottle into the same dessert spoon and ladeled down our throats while we held our noses against the vile smell. We swallowed it quickly because it tasted of rotting oily fish, and each of us shuddered and nearly gagged as it went down. "It does you good!" snarled Mum, daring us to complain.

At Nan's house about one and a half miles away, they were slightly less concerned about constipation, but nevertheless always kept a ball of Doctor's Liquorice in case anyone got "bound up". This was a black gobstopper nearly the size of a golf ball which had laxative properties. It was kept in an open bowl on the dresser among a collection of other nick-nacks such as winkle pins, needles, buttons, pencils, string, nails, collar studs, etc. Anyone who felt in need of a bowel movement would take out the lump of Doctor's Liquorice, pick off any fluff or dead flies, suck it for a while for its laxative juices, and then return it to the bowl for the next person.

I used to climb up to the dresser and have a lick occasionally but only because I liked the taste!

So here we were in 1943 finally living in our own little house in East Ham, London E6. The upstairs flat had been vacated and we had the house to ourselves. Unfortunately Dad immediately upset Mum by offering the rooms to a friend and his pregnant wife. They took up residence straight away. We probably needed the money.

However, this arrangement didn't last long as they had to share the kitchen. Mum fell out with the young girl when she found she was using one of our saucepans first to boil her husbands underpants, then to make his porridge. They soon got their marching orders!

The time came when I had to start school. Mum took me on the first day to Altmore Avenue Infant School and shoved me through the iron gate into the playground. That was it. Thereafter I had to make my own way there and back; a distance of about a quarter of a mile. My first teacher's name was Miss McGrath and my best friend was Roger Banks, who always wore a black beret and a rather posh fawn overcoat. Roger taught me how to play Kiss-chase and always work it so that you caught a girl right behind the brick air-raid shelter at one end of the playground. Don't ask me how I can remember these details from over sixty years ago when today I can't remember where I left my glasses.

By now my baby brother Pete was a year old and we had spread our meagre possessions to the upper part of the house. I finally had my own bedroom, the "box-room", the smallest room in the house, barely big enough for a single bed, a chair and a small built-in wardrobe that looked more like a shed!

We also could now use the bathroom instead of the old galvanised tin bathtub that hung on the wall in the "conservatory" and which we brought to the kitchen floor and filled with kettles of water and all shared every Friday night, whether we needed a bath or not!

The bathroom had an ugly old gas Geyser over the bath. When our Friday night bathing ritual switched upstairs, Dad would light the geyser with a long taper made of folded newspaper through a square hole in the front.
As the gas caught, there would be a bang, a whoosh!, and flames would shoot out and singe the hairs on the back of Dad's hand if he didn't pull it away quick enough.
The smoke and smell of the fumes spread through the house as hot water gushed into the bath. We thought we were living in luxury!

Dad had eventually joined Mum and I in London and found us a flat in a small end of terrace house in East Ham.

We moved in with the barest of furniture, enough for one back living room. We had two small easy chairs, a table and four dining chairs in the back room. The front room was the bedroom with Mum and Dad's bed and mine. Then there was the kitchen, no bathroom, a ramshackle lean-to (make-shift conservatory), an outside lavatory and a small garden with a dugout Anderson shelter.

When we moved in, the front garden, as we laughingly called the three feet of mud between the front room window and the pavement, was enclosed with ornate cast-iron railings fixed into a low brick wall, and our own gate. Very posh! However, we had no sooner taken up residence when some men came round from the council armed with hacksaws. They cut down the railings from the entire street, loaded them onto a lorry and took them away for the war effort. I would like to think they were melted down and made into bombs and dropped right on Adolf Hitler! Everyone hated Adolf Hitler of course, including me, though I wasn't exactly sure why!

I was quite happy about the railings going because it gave me extra space to play "out the front" on the beautifully tiled path leading to the house. Set in this path was a round cast iron cover to the "coal hole" about 12 inches across. This was where the coalman tipped his sacks of coal into the cellar and I soon found I could use it as another entrance by sliding down the shute onto the pile of coal then feeling my way to the cellar steps and up into the house. No one seemed to mind the filthy mess this made of my clothes. We weren't so fussy in those days.

The upper part of the house was occupied by an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Self. They were very kind to me and often invited me up to see them. Mr Self seemed to spend most of his time fiddling with his Crystal Set, a crude radio which he tuned somehow by scraping a needle on something that looked like a piece of coal and listening to some crackly noises on headphones. Sometimes he would put a headphone up to my ear and let me listen too.

Mr and Mrs Self, soon moved away to another house near the Gasworks. I rather think we made too much noise for them with Mum and Dad arguing and shouting at each other, and ME!!

We were glad of the extra space though, particularly as my brother Pete was on the way.