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Monday though, when the woman came upstairs with a face like thunder, and clutching a bit of meat from the dustbin. My mum never had much idea with leftovers and always used to throw out anything that hadn’t been eaten. I never really thought about it and just carried on the same. I suppose I thought that everybody did the same. Anyway, the woman suddenly stuck this piece of meat up in front of my face and asked, ‘Did you throw this out?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I muttered, ‘we had too much.’ I couldn’t think what else to say.
    â€˜You are a wicked, evil, girl,’ she said, ‘Don’t you realise there are kids in this house and you go throwing out perfectly good bits of meat.’
    She really tore me off a strip and by the time she had finished with me I felt about half-an-inch tall. It had just never occurred to me to do anything else. Anyway, after that I always gave her any leftovers every Monday. In fact, I used to buy a little bit extra just to make sure of the leftovers. From then on, she and her husband used to save up thre’pence every week for half a pint of beer so that after the kids had gone to bed they would sit up and have meat sandwiches and beer. That was the highlight of the week for them.

6
Derby Day
(early 1920s)

    M y father was a porter in Stratford Market, then one of the most important fruit and vegetable markets in London. He was pretty good at it too and on one occasion he held the record for the number of baskets he could carry at one time. The fruit used to be packed in flat, circular, baskets which stacked on top of each other, and the porters used to carry them, piled-up, balanced on their heads. Of course it was hard work but it was steady and he was allowed a sack of vegetables every week as part of his pay.
    Apart from the obvious holidays, like Christmas, Dad only got one day off a year and that was Derby Day. The whole market would close for the workers to have their day out to see the Derby. Dad, though, never went on the outing but instead used to go up to the Borough Market to see his old friends there. It was quite a day for him, and he used to get dressed up in his best suit for the highlight of his year. The only trouble was that Mum didn’t trust him not to get thoroughly drunk, so to restrain him a bit each year she insisted that he took me along. It must have cramped his style, but I thought it was wonderful, because I too used to get dressed up in my best clothes and was taken off on an adventure up in London. We used to visit a succession of pubs and at each one he would disappear inside for varying lengths of time. I suppose he must have been a bit of a ladies’ man in his time, because all the women used tomake a tremendous fuss of him. Each one used to give him a great big kiss and wild exclamations of ‘glad to see you Wally,’ ‘how are you Wally?’ ‘what’s the news?’ and so on.
    Much more fun to me, though, was the fuss and attention that I got. Of course I had to stay outside the pub, or very occasionally I could stand just inside the door, but this endless succession of women would come out to see ‘Wally’s girl’, ask me how I was, buy me a lemonade and sometimes give me a sixpence. I thought I was in heaven and could have stayed there forever. I could certainly drink as much lemonade as they could buy for me, it was wonderful.
    I used to make a big profit on the day and, more to the point, I was allowed to keep it. On the bus home, Dad would ask me how much I had got and what did I want to do with it. Usually I would take a halfpenny a day to school and buy myself sweets on the way home. Just once, I bought a quarter of a pound of toffees and I sat on the wall round the corner from home, where nobody would see me, so that I could eat them all myself. Getting back to Derby Day, the most important question was then, did I have somewhere safe to keep the money I had collected? The answer to that was yes, the corner of