Before then

Going back to my time before the war when I was just a small child, we lived in a two roomed downstairs flat with a gas light, I remember my mother sending me to buy a gas mantle from the corner shop across the road; the mantle was of a china clay like mesh cover, they used to burn out and disintegrate. These mantles were two or three pence, when they were new they burned with a clean light, but then got more yellowed as they aged, we also had a gas ring to boil the kettle on, this used to rest on the floor. However most of the cooking was done on the coal fire and oven as we couldn’t afford the penny for the meter most times. The home made bread my mother used to bake used to smell and taste really good, the most baked kind of bread was called stotty cake; this was pronounced stotty k-yeck a Geordie favourite. It seems to be dying out now as it doesn’t bake so well in modern ovens, the other name for it was oven bottoms.
On occasions when my mother could afford some meat we would have pie crust, this was made in a square roast tin with mostly black pudding stewing steak onions and gravy, with a cup in the middle to support the sheet of pastry laid on top. This was more of a rare occasion as I’ve said before we never had much in those days, I remember being covered in scabs as were other kids at that time; it was usually down to malnutrition a lack of vitamins; a lot of children suffered from it then.
At that time OXO’s used to come in a tiny individual box and cost one penny each, that mixed with hot water and a slice of bread was a meal for us hungry kids. Another thing was at times you could get a pile of broken kippers for coppers, really, it didn’t matter they tasted the same as whole ones.
When the war started and my father went off to his regiment, we some times used to go to the Cinema with my mother she was a bit better off financially with my father being in the army. Sometimes we would have to come out in the middle of the picture show because of an air raid, and then rush to an underground shelter staffed by air raid wardens. I remember being cradled in the arms of these two nurses who were taking turns nursing me; I was always a bit of a sleepy-head and could fall asleep on the cold lino floor.
One night we were called out of the cinema because this Barrage balloon had been hanging limp all day, I think it must have been holed in the air raid the night before; they couldn’t reel it in and was lying across the houses.
It eventually came down over the doorway of this pub and looked just like a big silver elephant, they always reminded me of elephants when they were moored around the town.