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.