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Talking of my fathers bike reminds me that even as long ago as 1936, he had rigged up indicator lights on the back. To do this he got an old tobacco tin and cut two arrows in the lid one pointing left, the other right. He then painted the lid white and having attached it to the back of the bike, by an ingenious bit of wiring and switches he could switch the left or right hand light on to indicate which way he intended to turn. Sometime around the age of two, whilst my mother was doing the ironing on the kitchen table (she did not have an ironing board), I managed to get hold of the flex and pull the electric iron off the table. The sharp edge of the iron hit me over the right eye causing a cut where I have a scar to this day.

A couple of years later I fell over when getting ready for a bath and hit the side of my face on the edge of the tin bath. This cut my skin alongside my left eye, and although it was not stitched up, it gave me yet another scar on my face.

During the years before the war I can vaguely recollect spending Christmas at my Grandparents house and my two cousins were there and all four children slept together in the big bed with an enormous feather mattress.

At home we did not have a bathroom and the toilet was a small brick building on the end of the house out in the back yard. The toilet had a wooden door that did not reach to the ground or up to the top, and it was extremely cold in there at times which not conducive to remaining longer than necessary. In those days it was common to have a POE for use during the night. In our house they were referred to as the “gazunder” because they “goes under the bed”. My mother and father had a china “gazunder” in their bedroom, but we three children had to make do with a galvanised bucket which sat out on the landing, and it had no privacy whatsoever either visually or aurally. That is to say you could hear everything and if you went out onto the landing you could see what anyone was doing, however it was the accepted thing then and nobody thought anything of it.

Fridays was bath night, and for this we used a galvanised tin bath which normally hung on the fence in the back garden. This bath used to be carried into the living room and put in front of the fire. The hot and cold water would then be brought in by means of buckets from the scullery where the water had been heated in the copper. Goodness knows when my parents had a bath for I do not recall ever seeing either of them sitting in the bath in front of the fire. My mother did the washing on Mondays and it seemed that she always left the dirty soapy water in the copper, for when my younger sister was about a year old she used to have screaming fits and would scream so much that she could not get her breath. My mother found that by dunking my sister in the cold water in the copper, she could make my sister gasp and get her breath back.

My next memories are when I was about three years old and we were staying on holiday in a bungalow near Pevensey. The bungalow was constructed of corrugated iron on a wooden frame and was situated at the top of the beach close to one of the Martello Towers. During that holiday, apart from my parents and my elder sister, there was also my paternal grandparents together with an Uncle and Aunt and their two children. Alongside the Martello tower was the cannon which had originally been placed on the top of the tower. I can recall that we children slept together in a big bed in one of the bedrooms and alongside the bungalow were two galvanised iron tanks which stored the rainwater from the roof.

Those tanks stand out in my mind because one night when we were in bed I remember a lot of shouting and when we got up in the morning, lying along the top of, and hanging down over the ends of the tanks was a large conger eel. Later in life I asked my father if he remembered and he said that my grandfather was fishing off the beach and the shouting was because the conger eel (for that is what it was) was so large and strong that it was pulling my grandfather into the sea and that my father and uncle had to rush and help him. Judging by my memories of the eel hanging over the ends of those water tanks, it must have been at least seven feet long, and it is not surprising that he was being pulled into the sea. I have a vague recollection of the birth of my younger sister in the November of 1939 because our next door neighbours were rather scruffy and uncouth and we were not allowed to play with the children. One day one of the children threw a knife over the fence at my elder sister and I which my mother apparently saw happen out of the kitchen window, and although apparently I was unaware that my Mother was pregnant, the knife throwing incident had frightened my mother so much that it brought about the birth of my sister. The next thing I knew was that there was a baby in the house, and my mother always insisted afterwards that the knife-throwing incident started the birth of my sister.

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