I was a child at the time and innocent of such matters, but I believe that just after the 1939-45 War, people had a different attitude towards animals than they do now. Animals were dispensible. They could be given as gifts and set aside if unwanted. Their needs came second to the family's. They were fed on scraps and leftovers. In the austere conditions we lived in just after the war, we were brought up to clear our plates and sometimes even licked them clean. Pets often went hungry.

My Aunty Daisy never quite cottoned on to the fact that her sister, my mother, could barely afford to feed her four children, let alone family pets. Aunt Daisy came to see us nearly every week and always bought us sweets and comics (often secondhand because they were cheaper) from Barking Market. Occasionally she would take a trip to Romford where they used to hold a regular livestock sale in the middle of town. Cattle, sheep, pigs etc., were auctioned off from pens set up in the main street, while little stalls on the pavement sold litters of newborn, kittens, puppies, rabbits, chicks etc., all probably cross breeds and semi wild. Aunty Daisy thought they were so cuddly and cute and could not resist buying one (and sometimes more than one) for us kids.

She would just turn up at the house saying, "Look what I've brought you." We would find and old cardboard box to put the latest animal/s in and spend 20 minutes or so, stroking, petting, prodding, "ooohing" and "aaahing", and deciding on a name. After that we mostly lost interest.

None of these animals was ever taken to a vet for injections or treatment. As they grew bigger, dogs were never taken for a walk, they lived on scraps. Most never reached maturity. They went blind or got distemper or ended up in some other horrible state before mysteriously disappearing. I did actually witness my father drowning one poor creature in a tin bath in the back yard.

I assume the cats ran away as soon as they became adults and started their own wild colonies on the surrounding bomb sites.

When Aunty Daisy presented us with a set of six fluffy little yellow chicks. They were housed in a shoe box by the fireplace. No one expected them to live long. Miraculously they outgrew that box and another larger and eventually Dad had to buy 6 yards of chicken wire to house them in the back garden.

They wandered aimlessly around this little shelterless pen for some weeks and grew to full size. They never produced eggs as far as I know and one by one they disappeared. I never knew where they went. All I remember was that just before Christmas, the last one, a scrawny old cockerel with a diseased foot who hopped around the pen on one leg, keeled over and dropped dead.

When Dad found it he dug a hole at the end of the garden and buried it. A couple of days later, Mrs Appleby, an old lady from across the road, was talking to Mum on the doorstep and enquired about the chickens. When Mum told her the news about the old cock, Mrs Appleby insisted Dad dig it up for her. She and Mr Appleby and their family ate it for their Sunday dinner!!

As I write this I feel ashamed for my family's attitude to animals, but that was the way it was.

My brother Peter was 4 years younger than me, so he was just three when World War II ended. He grew up quickly in post-war East End London.

At the age of six, Pete learned to ride Dad's bike. I had my own bike, a bright red Raleigh with "droop" handlebars (Dad's word for them), a rare birthday or Christmas present and my most treasured possession. Mum and Dad couldn't afford a bike for Pete yet so he used Dad's. Dad called it "The Phantom". It was a very old, sit-up-and-beg ladies bicycle, which he had "aquired" second-hand and used for going to work. Pete's little legs wouldn't reach the saddle, but he could ride by standing on the pedals between the handlebars and seat, since the bike had no crossbar. Pete followed me and my friends round the streets wherever we went and always seemed able to keep up.

One day, Pete and I set off to cycle to Southend-on-Sea, a distance from East Ham of about 25 miles. As a tenyearold with a sixyearold on an adults bike, neither of us doubted that we would complete the trip. The roads had so few cars in those days, it did not seem unreasonable for Mum and Dad to allow us to go. We actually made it to the sea front, but it took so long to get there we only had time to look over the sea wall, buy a bottle of "pop" and start off home. We arrived home at 11 o'clock that night exhausted. Mum and Dad were waiting on the door-step talking to some neighbours. Pete and I were too tired to notice if there was an air of panic about them. We were home ... that was all that mattered. Job done!

Everyone said Pete was slightly deaf, which may account for the way he talked. Loud and excitedly! If Pete went to the "Pictures", he would come home and tell us the entire story line of both films, with the gist of the newsreels and cartoons thrown in for good measure! Any time I took Pete on a bus, to my accute embarrassment, he would entertain all the other passengers with his incessant chatter, revealing our most intimate family secrets. Everyone said Pete was "oblivious".

Pete had his own set of "party tricks". He could fold both his ears inwards and stuff them into his ear-holes. Then he would sit grinning at you while you waited, in giggly anticipation, for them to pop out. They always flicked out one at a time, making us all roll about laughing! He mostly did it when Mum had told us all to "sit quiet and not make a sound!". I lost count of the times he got us in trouble for that!

Another disgusting little trick he learned was to make a big show of picking his nose in front of you. He would thrust his fore-finger right up his nostril and wiggle it about while secretly licking spit onto another finger. Then he would quickly wipe the wet saliva across your cheek so you thought it was snot! Dirty little monkey!

When he was only 6 or 7, Pete used to go off on his own to East Ham Swimming Baths. If the water in the pool was too cold for him he would sit in the warm water of the foot-bath that everyone had to walk through to wash their feet on the way to the pool. On his way home, sometimes after dark, he would call in at the Fish Shop for three penn'rth of chips and a gherkin and come down the road eating and singing at the top of his voice!

Sadly I haven't seen him for years.

Winter draws on! As winter approached in wartime London and the evenings got darker and colder us kids still played out in the street until the last minute even though we were freezing! When the war ended and street lighting came back on we congregated round the lampposts and stayed out even later. It was very late before our mums came to the front doorstep and yelled for us to "Get in this minute ... you little bleeders!!"

All the kids I knew wore much the same winter outfits, both for school and "playing out". Some better off kids had a "Sunday best". The uniform in the street was: black school shoes, long grey socks pulled up to the knees, short grey trousers (bare knees - only working men wore long trousers), long-sleeved shirt buttoned right up to the neck, Fair Isle knitted sleeveless pullover, tweed jacket (all buttons done up and collar up). This universal kids uniform was usually topped off with a grey or brown knitted Balaclava helmet, a "fashion accessory" of the time, which completely covered the head and neck leaving only a small oval hole in front to reveal the face.

Us kids all went round with our hands thrust deep into our pockets against the cold. We only ever took them out to roll marbles, pick noses, etc. When it was really cold our mums made us wear knitted scarves and gloves. The gloves soon got covered in snot if you had a cold.

All the knitted stuff, Balaclavas, pullovers, socks, scarves and gloves, were hand made by mums, nans and aunties who had no kids of their own. They were always knitting. Clack! Clack! And fast! They could all do it while having a conversation and reading a knitting pattern out of Woman's Own at the same time. If they weren't knitting they were rolling up balls of wool. They bought skeins of the stuff from the Wool Shop and made me sit with my arms outstretched holding the big loop while they unravelled it into a ball ready for knitting.

Sometimes someone would find an old unwanted knitted garment and spend ages unpicking it and rolling up the wool saying gleefully, "This will make Robert a lovely Balaclava!"

I even had a knitted hot-water-bottle cover with draw-strings. We had stone or metal hot-water-bottles and filled with boiling water they were too hot to touch at first. After a while in bed when it had cooled a bit you could take the cover off to get the last bit of heat. Trouble was, in the morning it was freezing cold and if you touched it, it made you jump. Sometimes you kicked it out of bed and it clattered on the hard floor and woke the whole house!
Happy Days!

When I was a child growing up in London's East End, during and just after World War II, summer started in the middle of Spring and lasted to the middle of Autumn. All the days were long, hot and sunny. It hardly ever rained. Or at least that's how I remember it. Winter seemed quite short by comparison but bitterly cold.

I was nine when the winter of 1947 brought the country to a standstill. It was one of the worst winters in living memory. From January to April, Britain was in the grip of arctic weather. Trains got stuck in snow drifts, shipping and air travel were severely restricted. Troops and even prisoners were used to clear snow to rescue people cut off in the countryside. Actually I don't remember much of that either, but I do recall the kind of things that affected our daily lives every winter in those dark days towards the end of the war and the late 1940's.

We had coal fires in every room in the house but usually the only one that got lit was in the back room which doubled as dining room, sitting room and playroom.

Lighting the fire was a ritual reserved mainly for my father. Dad would first rake out the ashes of last night's fire with the poker. They would fall through the slots in the cast iron fire basket in the hearth and collect in a metal tray underneath ready to be taken through the house to the back yard to be "chucked in the dustbin". Everything you didn't want was "chucked in the dustbin".

The process of cleaning out the grate would inevitably send clouds of dust through the air which would eventually settle over everything. Dad would then lay some scrunched up newspaper over the grate and a few sticks of firewood. Dad usually managed to scrounge a bit of old wooden furniture or fencing from some waste ground, which he would chop into "kindling" with a small axe on the concrete at the back of the house. If it was very cold outside he might do this in the hearth itself. Sometimes splinters of wood would fly round the room. After the sticks of firewood he would carefully arrange a few lumps of precious coal on top. Then came the tricky bit!

To light the fire and force it to catch to the coal as quickly as possible, Dad used a highly dangerous trick. After using a match to start the paper burning, he would open out a full sheet of newpaper and hold it over the whole fireplace opening. This would create a terrific draught which would enter under the fire grate and whoosh up the chimney fanning the flames against the wood and the coal. Dad would kneel there with outstretched arms holding the newspaper tight across the fireplace until the glow of the raging fire could be seen right through it. Then we would all get excited as a brown singe mark started to appear and grow and eventually burn through. Dad would hold the paper in place as it burned until the very last moment when he would screw up the last remaining shreds and throw it into the fire. Sometimes something went wrong and bits of burning debris flew out onto the mat in front of the fire and had to be hurriedly stamped out.

Dad being a bit of an inventor, he eventually made a "fire-starter" out of a sheet of aluminium carefully shaped and with a wooden handle. He probably nicked the ali from work where it may have been destined to be part of a Spitfire! Who knows! Everybody had to be a scrounger to survive in those days.