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to a chair. I was shitting myself after that – every time we walked passed that bombsite I thought the police were after me. And the next few times I went shopping with my mum I’d duck down in the seat of the car if a police car came past, which I suppose was good training for later life.
    All the bombsites are gone from Plaistow now, but you can still see where they once were from where the houses stop. A little block of flats in the middle of a terrace is always a tell-tale sign, and where the gaps have been filled in it’s like the street has got false teeth.
    Not all the memories prompted by seeing my old primary school again are happy ones. Quite early on in my time there I got six of the best across the arse for throwing stones up in the air. OK, one came down and hit another kid on the head, but he wasn’t badly hurt, and it was obviously an accident. The headmaster wasn’t having any of it though, and he gave me a caning I can still remember to this day. I was absolutely terrified to tell my mum and dad, and the fact that the weals only came to light because my mum was bathing me shows you how young I was.
    She asked what had happened so I had to tell her. When my dad found out he went round to the school to hear the headmaster’s side of the story. He sat down calmly and listened to his explanation,then when the teacher had finished talking he said, ‘So let me get this straight. My boy is five years old, and you’ve given him six hard wallops across the arse for something he didn’t even mean to do?’
    I’m not exactly sure what happened next but the impression I got was it was something along the lines of my dad forcing the teacher’s head down onto the desk and trying to shove his cane down his throat. Either way, the headmaster never looked at me again, which was a result as far as I was concerned. I did get caned a few times over the years, and sometimes I deserved it, but that one was a fucking liberty.
    When you’re five or six years old, the boundaries of your world are very clearly defined. Going somewhere in the car was fine, but if I ever walked further than the school, it was like you were Christopher Columbus and didn’t know if you were going to fall off the edge of the world.
    Apart from Sunday trips over to Hackney to see Maud and Toffy, the main excursion we used to go on would be out of London to see Nanny Rich, Reg Hallett, Auntie Olive and Uncle Len in Shoeburyness. Those drives along the old Southend road seemed to go on forever, and there were three trips which particularly stuck in my mind.
    My dad had an old Austin van. If we were all going to squeeze into it, I usually ended up sitting over the engine, between the passenger seat and the driver, which was not so great in the summer. But in the winter I’d be the only one who was warm, especially while the van was lacking a back window, as happened for a while after it got smashed. One time we were driving east in thick snow when the car broke down near the Halfway House pub. Obviously you couldn’t just call the AA on your mobile in those days and there wasn’t a heater you could put on in the car, so we were absolutely freezing.
    I can’t actually remember who rescued us on that occasion, but another time we didn’t make it all the way to Nanny Rich’s house was when we hit a Labrador which ran out in front of us. The dog flew up in the air and came down in the road with a horrible smack, then just got up, shook itself and ran away, apparently none the worse for the impact. We were alright too – just a bit shocked – but my dad’s van was not so lucky. The front of it was severely smashed to pieces and there was steam coming out of the radiator, so we had to wait till someone we didn’t know stopped to help us. When this guy found out what had happened, he ended up giving me, Mum and Laura a lift all the way back to Plaistow.
    That wouldn’t happen now – apart from anything else, a woman would be frightened of