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end of Lett Road. I didn’t think about it and ducked under the rope to go home. Suddenly this policeman called out and came chasing after me. I was dead scared, but when I explained I lived there he got another policeman to walk all the way home with me. A little while later there was a man sitting on our front wall, so Mum went to see what he was up to and send him on his way. Instead she took pity and asked if he would like a cup of cocoa. I will always remember his reply – ‘I’d even like a glass of water, lady.’
    He must have been in a bad way because Mum invited him in to sit on the bottom of our stairs while she got the cocoa. Then she noticed his feet. He had the remains of a pair of boots wrapped round them, and inside those were some tatters of an old pair of cotton socks stuck to his feet by the dried blood. So she sent me to boil a kettle, then bring a bowl of hot water, then bring a flannel, then bring scissors to cut off the remains of the socks, then bring a towel. Mum was soft-hearted but never did anything herself – she supervised while others did all the fetching and carrying! To crown it all, she even dug out an old pair of Dad’s socks and an old pair of boots before she sent him on his way. Dad hit the roof when he got home.
    Over the next day or so the men gradually drifted away and the street became quiet again. I will never forget the desperation of those men that brought them from the other end of the country to start a riot in our street.

4
A Woman on the Bus
(1916)

    O ne day, a couple of years after the war [Editor’s note: Second World War], I was upstairs on the bus and started talking to this woman who happened to be sitting next to me. Goodness knows who she was, I’d never seen her before or since, but she was about the same age as me and grew up in the same places as me, so we had a lot of experiences in common. We were talking about how things used to be, how tough our early lives had been, how grim life had been in the First World War, the Depression, and so on and on, when we passed the City of London Cemetery. The woman looked straight past me at the cemetery and went all misty-eyed. For a couple of moments she sat silently watching the cemetery going past. Suddenly she said, ‘My baby brother is buried in there.’ Well, it wasn’t unusual for little babies to die back then; we didn’t have the medical services to care for babies either during the birth or if they got little colds or other illnesses afterwards. As often as not you couldn’t afford to get a doctor anyway, unless things were really bad, and then it was often too late. Even so, it didn’t make any difference that baby deaths happened so often – they were never any easier to cope with.
    Her brother’s death had obviously affected this woman terribly and so I made some comforting noises about how awful it must have been, and how difficult it used to be for everybody, how babies used to die because we could not afford doctors, and so on, when she broke in, ‘It wasn’t like that!’ Andwhat a story she went on to tell! She admitted that most of her story had been put together afterwards, because at the time she was too young to realise quite what was going on. Her mother had never said anything about it and had refused to talk about it, so she had gradually made sense of the events she remembered as she grew up and her understanding increased.
    Her mother had been pretty young, barely much of a teenager herself, and it seems that she had met this fellow who had a good job and in a matter of months they were married. They moved into a couple of rooms, which was good going when lots of just-marrieds had to live with one or other set of parents. Nine months later the first child was born – the woman that I was talking to. Within a very short time the First World War broke out and the woman’s father joined up. So, within little more than a year, this woman’s mother had met a man,