Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Read Online Free PDF Page A

along the way like tinned peaches or salmon.
    Molly wasn’t a big eater so the combination of what was officially available to us on the ration books plus the extra black-market goodies from the Lane meant we were well fed, at least.
    As a toddler, I was crazy for anything sweet, an inheritance of my mother’s own love of sweets and sugar. (Late in life she confessed that she’d eaten mainly ‘nosh’, or sweets, throughout her pregnancy.) Chocolate spread was my particular favourite, ‘bread and bread and chocolate spread’ an early mantra. Since both bread and sugar remained on ration long after the war ended (bread until 1948 and sweets until l953), my endless cravings for sugar were sometimes satisfied via the black-market goodies that arrived in those weekly deliveries. But even so, a whole block of chocolate or a proper box of chocolates was virtually unknown. You didn’t ever see such things.
    And so it turned out that when my father finally did get his demob papers and came home to us in the flat, his arrival from overseas and into our lives was somewhat overshadowed – by a big box of Cadbury’s.
    It’s spring and I am wearing a little white dress with smocking, sent to us by my mother’s sister, Rita, who knitted and sewed beautifully and supplied my mum with regular clothing items for me before she left for Africa.
    The front door to our flat is open and a strange man walks in, flinging his bags down in the narrow hallway.
    I run, curly-haired and chubby-legged, down the hallway towards the man. I know who it is, because I’ve been primed in advance.
    ‘Is my daddy!’ I shout, my claim to the man who until now had lived on the mantelpiece.
    My dad, thin and pale from bouts of malaria, his civvies virtually hanging off him after his epic sea journey from India, throws his bags on the floor and scoops me up for a welcoming hug, the baby he’s seen in pictures, already a chatterbox toddler. He’s got a present for me. ‘Wait till you see what I’ve got for you,’ he chuckles. Then he lugs the bags into the bedroom and emerges, minutes later, beaming all over and sporting his Big Homecoming Gift.
    For a first effort, it was outstanding. Never in the history of post-war gift giving has a small child been so thrilled, so enraptured by a homecoming offering.
    Looking back, it was magnificent booty for the times. How did he manage to obtain this astonishing gift? Even now, in my mind’s eye, I see it as an enormous box. And inside the prized purple square box are what seem, to me, to be hundreds of Cadbury’s chocolates, delights of all shapes and sizes – square ones, thin ones, hard toffee, oozy caramel, orange flavoured, ginger, soft and hard centres, chocolate after chocolate after chocolate. A sugary bonanza. I’m squirming, squealing with delight.
    My parents, together at last, carelessly let me take ownership of the box. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so distracted by the occasion – it had been over two years since they clapped eyes on each other – they might have thought to take the box away from me and hide it somewhere safe, away from prying little hands. But this is their reunion, their big day. It’s a lot to cope with, seeing each other again and meeting a toddler you’ve only known through photos.
    So that’s how the chocolates became mine and mine alone. I was destined to be a spoilt only child, indulged by parents who adored me and never really knew how to say no. And the indulgence all started the day Ginger came home from the war with that big box of chocolates. Because once I have the sweets to myself, there’s no stopping me. Greedy isn’t the word. I determinedly chomp my way, choccy after choccy, through the lot. Like most greedy guts, the more I eat, the less I taste or savour. I just cram them into my tiny gob, one after the other, an orgy of sugar. Until there are no more chocolates left nestling alluringly in their little dark-brown paper homes. And my pretty white