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anybody came in they were immediately offered a cup of tea. Old Mrs M used to go even further and every night she would pour the remains of that day’s tea into a jug, which she kept on the dresser. Anybody who turned up was then offered a drink from the jug – cold stewed tea! It was absolutely foul.
    These days you just don’t appreciate just how tough times could be. When I was a little girl we used to live upstairs in the house and there was a couple living downstairs with two kids. One day the wife came up to ask if Mum wouldlike her to go and buy some cheese or something for her ‘for thre’pence’. So Mum prodded and probed and eventually discovered the reason. Apparently the husband had finally got a job, but would have to go out very early the next morning to start work. The wife wanted to buy some tea, milk and sugar so that she could send him to work with a cup of tea inside him, and she quite literally didn’t have a penny in the house. He would do the whole day’s work on that cup of tea. Mum gave the woman sixpence to buy some lunch as well. Mum was like that. I can remember times when she sent me round to Mrs Somebody-or-other with a bag of potatoes, carrots and a few onions and the firm instruction that ‘even if she offers, you must not take a penny for bringing it; not even a ha’penny!’ She realised the woman was short and did something about it!
    I will say this for Mum, whatever her many faults, she was generous and would not see anybody go hungry. And in those days people could go hungry and get into the most terrible state for the want of very little money. A couple of years after the war I was walking through Stratford and I met a girl I used to go to school with. After we had talked for a little while she said, ‘Do you realise your mum saved my life?’ I didn’t, so she told me the story. Soon after we had left school she had to get married and they had one kid, but her husband couldn’t get work and they just got deeper and deeper into poverty. Eventually they were just completely out of money, out of things to pawn, out of things to sell, and had borrowed as much as they could stand from friends and relatives. She had just had enough of the struggle and decided that she couldn’t go on. So she was walking through Stratford trying to work out how to kill herself when she met Mum. They started talking and slowly the story came out about how desperate the family was. As they parted Mum gave her half-a-crown and that bought food for another day. After that, the mood of desperation passed and gradually things began to look up. As far as she was concerned, even looking back twenty years or so, she insisted that on that one day Mum saved her life for half-a-crown.
    People were simply poor, and poor in a way you just don’t see these days – and nor would you want to see it again. We were alright because Dad always had a job and was able to walk straight back into it after the war. That was leaving aside that because of his job he got us all the vegetables and fruit we wanted either free or cheap.
    You could see barefoot children in the streets. Fred told me once that when he was in the senior class at school his teacher used to buy biscuits out of his own pocket and gave Fred the job of finding out who hadn’t eaten anybreakfast before coming to school and giving them a biscuit each. It could be awful, but you just had to get by.

    Mary and Horatio Barker – the granpdarents – in about 1925.
    The Bacon family used to live a few doors from us when I was a girl. It was a second marriage for the wife, which was pretty unusual in those days, and from the way she spoke and acted I think she must have come down a lot. She was a bit classy, if the truth be told. That aside, though, they were ever so happy but very poor and so were always looking for ways to make money. Apart from anything else Mrs Bacon had a baby every year so