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.