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.