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Created | Updated Sep 21, 2006
1921 – Sitting on the doorstep in Tottenham, sharing a jam sandwich with my first sweetheart Doreen, from next door but one. (I never found another sweetheart until I was aged 30. I married that one 57 years ago yesterday.) Being taken on my father's bike to his allotment, where he had a very beautiful row of 'soppy gloshers' (salpiglossis). Sitting in the galvanised bath on the kitchen table in front of the hot cast-iron kitchen range being bathed by my father. Suddenly my baby sisters' nappies hanging on the iron rack over the range burst into a sheet of fire, reaching across the ceiling. I saw it first and tried to scream but my throat closed. Dad felt the heat on his
back, turned, snatched the burning material with his hands and stamped it out.
1923 – After removing to East Barnet, one evening we were visited by Doreen's mother and another friend. They were sitting in our tiny kitchen when, on my way to bed, I had to run the gauntlet, squeezing through just wearing my nightshirt. On my way past her, Mrs Valour lifted up my shirt-tail and cried 'I can see his little bum!' Although just four years old, I already had my dignity and did not like it dented.
c 1924 – A strange man came to the back door where I was sitting. He had a pronounced cast in one eye, as had my father (which I had never noticed), resulting from an attack of measles as infants. I yelled 'Mum, there's a man here, and he's boss-eyed!' The stranger took it in good part; he was Dad's brother, one of the fifteen surviving siblings.
1925 – Another uncle came to stay for the week. He liked cider and we were an abstaining family. Dad bought a firkin of the beverage from the Prince of Wales opposite and rigged up the little barrel with its wooden tap on a home-made stand in the bathroom, the only room in our little home where there was sufficient space. I was forbidden to touch the stuff, as it was nasty and would make me ill. Then why did it not make Uncle ill I reasoned. At the first opportunity, I lay on my back with my mouth under the wooden tap; by means of my hands on the tap I managed to draw myself up and get the spigot in my mouth. After turning it on, a trickle ran into my mouth. They were right - it was sour and horrible. I tried to turn it off, but my weight had wedged it tight. I dare not stop and let the cider flow onto the floor, so I kept on drinking as I struggled to turn it off. That's all I remember. At some stage I lost consciousness. Dad had brought his leather rifle strap home from the Great War. He used it to strop his open razor on. It had another use, too, but not on this occasion; I was too ill.
