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!