Hello Listers Joe and Muriel have sparked off the little grey cells again! Our flat in Besant Road was exactly the same as the other seven in the block and the eight in the adjacent block. The front, and only, door gave into an ‘L’ shape passage or hall with walls rendered with concrete and a red quarry tiled floor. The entire passage was about four metres or so long and to the left ended in a kitchenette of the same construction, which boasted three floor-to-ceiling cupboards all on the right side. The furthest cupboard had a small grill window and this was the larder, the middle cupboard was for brooms and cleaning materials and the third, where the penny or shilling in the slot gas meter was housed was the coal cellar. This was not a cellar at all, but a cupboard fitted with four or five boards that slotted one on top of the other to prevent the coal falling into the kitchen. As stocks dwindled, so one of the boards was removed to enable the coal to be reached with a shovel. The state of our coal stock had a significance beyond the obvious. Naturally a full cupboard afforded a considerable degree of security both against being cold and having to find the money to replenish it. To me though a full cupboard meant having to reach awkwardly above my head to get the coal out but being able to stand on the coal to put a penny in the meter. A near empty cupboard meant it was easy to collect the ‘slack’ (mainly dust!) in the shovel but precarious trying to balance on a chair and reach the gas meter. Short though it was I hated being sent ‘down the passage’ in the dark to get a shovel of coal for the living room fire from the terrifying coal cupboard. When we first lived in our flat the ‘little’ room, as Mum always called it, was not occupied. I presume this was chiefly because we had limited furniture. It was situated on the right corner of the flat and reached through the only door on the right of the passage. I slept in my mother and father’s bed until I was six years old or thereabouts. Les had a little bed and Ron the cot, all of us in the main bedroom in the far left corner of the flat. This room had a built-in gas fire but we very rarely used it much because it was so expensive to run. Between the kitchenette and the ‘little’ room was the bathroom fitted with a bath, a water closet and nothing else. This, too, had rendered concrete walls and a tiled floor. Access was via a door to the left of the passage just as you entered the flat. The walls of the two bedrooms were plastered and the floors boarded and the same was true of the living room, which occupied the right corner of the flat with one wall common to the main bedroom and the other to the ‘little’ room. The living room was the centre of our small universe. It was our dining room, sitting room, workshop, and study. It was here, in those days before the outbreak of the Second World War, that Dad having cycled home, would eat his lunch and then be off again. It was in this room that Mum would sit at the table showing us how to draw apples and pears, teach us how to play cards, ‘ Sevens’ and ‘Beat Your Neighbours Out Of Doors’. It was here that I learned to tell the time and to name all of the forty-nine counties in England before I started school at five years and three weeks old, the youngest in the class. The living room, too, was where I watched with fascination as my father placed his shaving mug full of hot water on the mantelpiece in front of the mirror and proceeded to shave using a safety razor. Early in the war we often had air raids at night. Both Dad and Mr Strutt, whom Dad called ‘Min’and who lived in the flat above us, were firewatchers during these nighttime air raids. At first, when the alert sounded, we would be awakened from our sleep and taken in pyjamas and a blanket to settle with Mum into that narrow passage leading to the kitchenette. No prospect of lying down as the passage was only about thirty inches wide and not more than six feet or so long. But it was the strongest part of the flat. It was not many weeks before Mrs Strutt and her two daughters Rose and Joan came to join us every time the siren sounded. Soon the raids increased in intensity and frequency and for months we spent many hours each night with the seven of us crowded into that small space. The flat is still there much as it was in 1935. Len