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the street. Mum said ‘Come on, we’ll get away from here.’ I saw many people around the butcher’s shop. Some of the men then went upstairs to the flat and threw the piano out of the window. I remember it coming down and, just before it crashed onto the pavement, my Mum pulled me away. I think he moved away after that.’
    It was estimated that the Great War claimed 10 million lives. But, in 1918, the year it ended, doctors were claiming that the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ was killing even more people worldwide.
    ‘Aunt Flo, when she was carrying again, she died of it and Cousin Flo caught it as well. She was very ill and we thought we were going to lose her too. My Mum went round there and nursed her, so my sister stood on a box and I stood on a stool, and we put a big tub on another box and we did the washing while Mum was looking after Flo and the others. And, when she got better, my Mum caught it and my sister and I nursed our mother.
    Cousin Flo lost every hair on her head and wouldn’t go to work, cos’ she’d got a bald head and Mum - she told me this herself - mixed old-fashioned brilliantine with paraffin and rubbed it in Flo’s head every day. She said ‘I’ve got Flo’s hair growing!’
    We used to call Flo Fanny Nine Hairs! She went to work with a frilly mop hat that Mum made for her out of shantung (
heavy Chinese silk
). My Mum saved her life.
    Isn’t it funny when we look back and remember all those things? Flo did have lovely black hair before she lost it and it grew back all curly. And her brother Charlie was curly.’
    The First World War ended at 11 o’clock on the morning of 11th November 1918, and there was great rejoicing, but also enormous sadness for all the bereaved:
    ‘My Mum picked us up out of bed and she said ‘Come on you two, you’d better get up, the siren’s going.’ Then she said ‘It’s all right, it’s the all clear!’ We had just come to the end of the war. It was a Saturday morning.
    I remember the Peace Teas with all the trestle tables down the middle of the road. And we had a platform and people were singing and dancing and doing turns. Florrie and I were dressed as Japanese girls. We had paper chrysanthemums in our hair that Mum had made. I was sitting there, watching it all, and my Dad tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘I’m home!’ He’d been demobbed. I remember the first suit he had. He went up to the market and had it made with the ticket or whatever they gave him. And the first day he went out in it, it rained and the suit shrunk and the trousers came up to here. And he said ‘Look at this damn fine suit they give yer!’
    After the War, Dad was offered a position in the prison service as a guard, but Mum didn’t want us girls to have to live near a prison - the job would have come with a house, you see. He was two inches too short anyway. I used to see him swinging from the door-frame to try and make himself taller. It didn’t make no difference.’
So Edwin Turner went back to work for Lipton’s
.

Part Two
1923-1939

Seven
Hats, Coats and Cameras
    Ethel left school at 14 to earn a full-time wage, though she and Florrie had worked part-time in a sweet shop:
    ‘Dad came in once and caught us scrubbing the floor. ‘You’re not doing that at your age - OUT!’ he said. The manager of the shop had once asked me to clean his shoes too, but I told him ‘I’m not here to clean your boots!’
    I left school on the Friday and on Monday, Florrie and I had an interview at Houghton-Butcher manufacturing Co. Ltd. (
the company merged to become Houghtons and Butchers in 1926. In 1930, the firm came under the sales umbrella name of Ensign, a camera manufacturing company in Walthamstow
.) We started at dinnertime on the same day. Florrie had left school before me, as she was older, and had been working as a dressmaker, which is what my father wanted me to do. But she was no good at it, so she left and we both got work at Ensign.
    When my sister started