(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.