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while you could because it was expensive and was only bought when someone was ill.Although we had free healthcare under the newly created National Health Service (established 1948), from 1952 it cost your mum a shilling to get a doctor’s prescription form filled in at the chemist, and this charge was increased to one shilling per item in 1956.
    There was also a charge of £ 1 introduced for dental treatment in 1952. No child of the ’50s will ever forget the dreaded visits to the dentist. It was the stuff of nightmares! That horrible cube of dry wadding that the dentist would shove under your back teeth to keep your mouth open, and the awful smell of the black rubber face-mask that was held over your nose and mouth to administer the anaesthetic gas that would send you to sleep and into a world of hallucinatory nightmarish dreams. Afterwards, you drifted back into consciousness tasting the disgusting mix of bleeding gums and residual gas in your mouth, and the nausea inevitably brought on bouts of uncontrollable vomiting. The horrendous experience didn’t end at the dentist’s door because the soreness, nausea and dizziness could last for several hours. Who could question why a child of the ’50s would often need to be dragged screaming and shouting to the dentist’s chair?
    Any child that was hospitalised in the 1950s will remember the Nightingale wards, named after Florence Nightingale, with rows of beds each side of a long room and large tables in the middle where the nurses did their paperwork and held meetings. The nurses were always so clean and smart in their uniforms, with white starched bib-front pinafore dresses and caps, and blue elasticated belts with a crest on the buckle. Most had an upside-down watch pinned to the top of their pinafore for use when they checked patients’pulses. Was there ever a boy with a slow pulse reading? Most young girls wanted to be a nurse and the boys wanted to marry one! The smell of ether was ever present throughout hospital buildings, but if you were an inpatient you soon got used to it. For young kids, hospitals were lonely places and you could feel abandoned. You were often placed in adult wards and up until 1954, children in hospital were only allowed to see their parents on Saturdays and Sundays, and only for a short time. The hospitals were run very formally, with Matron’s daily inspections sending every nurse into a panic, but you were very well looked after, and the doctors and nurses were wonderful.

Three
T HE S TREETS AND B OMB R UINS
    There you are, out in the street wearing your new Davy Crockett fur hat and a belt with double holsters strapped to your legs, looking down the barrel of a Roy Rogers silver six-shooter cap-gun, and you have just run out of caps for your Wyatt Earp style long barrel shotgun. Nothing for it but to run home and get your spud-gun and one of mums big baking potatoes for ammunition.
    ‘Come on, get out of that bed, it’s eight o’clock and you can’t lie there all day!’ Blimey, you can’t even get a lie-in on a Saturday morning! You turn over and curl up again for another minute’s shut-eye while you try to pick up the threads of your broken dream. No, you haven’t really got the latest six-shooter cap-gun with matching holsters, but you’ve seen one in your local Woolworths store and you dream of having it, along with all the other trappings of your big-screen cowboy heroes. You have got a DavyCrockett fur hat that your mum made for you, but sadly, your cowboy adventures are usually played out with guns and rifles made from sticks and lumps of wood that you have whittled into shape with your penknife, and the sound effects are just primitive ‘bang-bangs’ that you shout as you aim your deadly weapon at the escaping bandits.
    ‘Come on, get out of that bed, it’s a quarter past eight and your mates will be knocking for you soon!’ Yes, I must get up or I’ll be late for Saturday Morning Pictures at the Odeon!
    If you lived