I remember (bits and pieces).....

.....wearing hotpants and very high platform shoes, well it was the end of the 1960s start of the 1970s. My favourite pair of hotpants were heavy brown suede. Mini skirts could be a problem if you needed to bend over or go upstairs on the bus but hotpants gave us enough freedom and stay respectable. Platform shoes had to be the biggest for me as I'm so short, but I made sure my now Hubby didn't wear his so I could at least come up to his shoulder in our wedding photos.

....as a young teenager having very backcombed hair and peel-off eyeliner over false eyelashes, very Dusty Springfield.

.....melting my plastic finger nails in the cinema as I carelessly flicked cigarette ash into the ashtray. The smell of melting plastic seemed to amuse my date while I was mortified.

.....family holidays by the sea.....dad's string vest.....caravan at Canvey Island which was a free holiday for us as our next door neighbours and very good friends owned the caravan.

.....roller skating one footed as we only had one pair of roller skates, the sort that adjusted and strapped to your shoes. Wanting to play out as sisters together wasn't a problem as often two of us would have just one skate each and propel with the other foot like a scooter.

.....having to pull a very loose tooth before my parents went out and mum not wanting to get too close as she was all dressed up. I did it and they knew it was under my pillow. I can't remember what the going fairy rate was though, probably a silver sixpence!

.....having my one and only fight at school, think I was second year so 11 or 12 years old. Her name was Elizabeth Lockyear and she picked on me for quite some time, nothing major, nothing you would actually call bullying, but enough to chip away at my passive nature until one day in Home Economics class she got flour all over the walk in store cupboard and me then came out to tell the teacher I'd  done it. Her face was a picture when I whispered in her ear "that's it, playground after school, I'm paying you back!" I was shaking from then till home time, but I had a good bunch of friends supporting me. You know in the cartoons a fight is just a big ball of dust with the occasional limb coming out then going back in? Well that's how it felt. She ran off crying and I was left with a handful of her hair, so I considered myself the winner although parts of me were black and blue for weeks. She never bothered me again and thankfully neither did anyone else.

.....my greengrocer uncle coming over with dented food cans that had often lost their labels. It was kind of him, better than throwing good food away, but we did feel like the poor relations getting a charity handout. Then of course dinners were a bit of a gamble with mum opening peaches when she really needed peas. Never tasted or even heard of lychees till we discovered them in a dented tin and they were lovely.

.....getting a Saturday job when I was just 13 years old. It was an old fashioned ladies clothes shop (that's old fashioned shop not old fashioned clothes). I had to get two buses or a train and a bus to get there and I worked 8-9 hours, also would go in some school holidays and during sale time I'd go in Sundays to clear up and restock as Saturday would be too busy to get it all done. For a Saturday I earned £1 10s (£1.50) which was a lot more than my friend got at Woolworths.

.....sneaking out from the dress shop one Saturday, when I was asked to do a bit of shopping for one of the sales girls, and nipping into the jewellers and getting my ears pierced.

.....having a cat to keep mice away and having a dog briefly. The cat was actually a stray my brother at about 4 years old, befriended in the street and brought in. The dog was a pedigree minature poodle, chocolate brown so we called him Cocoa.  UncleM said it was a gift, but we found out that he'd actually bought it for himself and his wife refused to have it in the house. Unfortunately sisterP was terrified of dogs and the dog was terrified of the cat so uncleM was called back to find it another home.

.....Dr Rhodes Boyson was headmaster when  I was at Robert Montefiore Comprehensive School. He was later knighted and also an MP under Margaret Thatcher. He was very strict with all pupils and staff alike and we were all terrified of him. He always wore his masters black gown, which in an East London school full of children from very low income families l guess looked quite odd.

.....saving really hard from my Saturday job and paying it into the school bank for a school skiing holiday. My parents couldn't afford to contribute and I'd worked out that I could just about make the cost of the holiday and the cost of equipment hire there but absolutely nothing more, so I was hoping to beg and borrow warm clothing etc, however, just a few weeks before we were meant to go the UK devalued the £ making the whole trip so much more expensive. I couldn't go. I withdrew all my money and went shopping! I'd probably have broken my leg, suffered hyperthermia or something anyway!

.....having lunch with Cliff Richard, but this is now quite a long post so I'll leave you guessing on that one and post again when I have another page full starting with my lunch with Cliff :-)
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I remember youth clubbing.....

From the age of nine till I was 19 Brady Youth Club was a huge part of my life.  It was situated in Whitechapel in the heart of East London.

It was a Jewish youth club as the Eastend at that time was home to a very large Jewish community, mostly coming as immigrants pre and post first world war. There was a very open Jewish culture in the club, observing all the holy days and religious rituals, but I don't think non-Jews who wanted to join were ever excluded, friendships and supporting each other were always important.

I think there was a pre-school nursery run there during the day, but I can't quite remember. There definitely was an after-school club for infants as I remember often helping to go and collect them from school and walk them round. As a teenager I used to hide at the club during the day when I skipped school so was there to help (don't tell my grandchildren *wink*). Next group up was split into 'minors boys' and 'junior girls' which was when I joined, then I think we moved up again at the same time as moving from primary school to senior school. For me school was the comprehensive round the corner from club.

The building was amazing, it was huge inside, with offices, canteen and kitchen serving food as well as soft drinks (egg and chips my favourite), there were two big halls one of which had a stage and all the sound equipment and lighting etc available at that time (we are talking about the 1960s) and backstage dressing rooms for plays and shows (I've a photo of me as Christabel Pankhurst when we did a musical play about suffragettes but I can't find it). The other hall a well equipped sports hall with changing rooms and showers (can't find the photo of me on the trampoline either which I know is here somewhere). That was the ground floor. The basement and first floor had more rooms where we would have various activities like drama and table tennis and debating and one with the snooker table where I mostly sat on the window sill and chatted to the boys playing. The long basement corridor was ideal for archery or target practice with .22 guns neither of which I did. And then above all that on the second floor was a self contained flat where a family lived (I think it was one of the club directors, wife and children).

Our youth club also owned a country house in Kent, Skeet House where we would have group holidays and weekends away. When we were there we enjoyed all the outdoor countryside activities you just don't do in London. In the winter if it snowed we took all the tea-trays to Lullingstone golf course so we could toboggan down the hills. At Christmas we would volunteer at the local hospital. People really believed the house was haunted but I never felt spooked there.

Other club holidays were usually camping, a summer camp would have to cater for about 300 people with huge marquees for dining and big bell tents for sleeping, latrines were massive ditches covered with a wooden framework with flimsy doors and wooden holes in planks for loo seats. We affectionately called them the Austin Suite as Frank Austin was a famous furniture maker and director of the club.

 As club members we were always encouraged to help others so aged 15/16ish I joined Jewish Youth Voluntary Service and went out with the St Mungo charity for the homeless on their soup runs, taking soup and rolls out all night to the tramps sleeping rough on the streets or in the railway arches of Shoreditch or under empty stalls in Petticoat Lane. Most had very sad stories but some were there as a definite life choice! It taught me a lot!

There were many very famous visitors to our club, Prince Philip came in the 1950s, the Beatles came in 1964, I can remember meeting Fenella Fielding, Ronnie Corbet and Frankie Vaughan. Celebrities would often be a guest for our annual awards night when they would be entertained first then give out our awards and certificates earned throughout the year. I was in quite a few of the plays and shows, as well as the suffragettes I've been the devil when the angel and I had to decide the fate of Henry VIII while his life was acted out behind us, there was the French Apache dance still vivid in my mind where Kelvin did the acrobatics to my seductive temptress (don't ask hahaha), and a play we called "out of the dustbin and onto the stage" where we managed to turn Chekhov into farce! Even remembering now I'm giggling :-)

A regular club night Monday to Thursday was meet up in the canteen and have something to eat and drink as most of us came straight from school,  then we'd go off to various activities. All back in the canteen for an assembly with relevant announcements and finishing the evening with disco. Sunday evenings had live music socials, dancing to lots of bands we'd barely heard of who later became really famous, like Jimi Hendrix, Procal Harem, Pink Floyd, Gino Washington and the Ram Jam Band, Simon Dupree and the Big Sound  and lots more. They were fantastic nights.

I had the honour of being voted Girls' Club captain for one year, and I got to carry a clip board, which was considered a true badge of office as all the managers tended to carry clipboards hahaha. The climax of that year was being awarded a place on a four week youth holiday in Israel. I celebrated my 18th birthday in an air-raid shelter right on the Lebanese border! I'd never been abroad before that.

Members had to leave at 19 years old but they could come back as staff when they were 21. The enforced break was to ensure we didn't all become totally reliant on the safety of the institution. None of us ever wanted to leave but agreed it was the right time to be pushed into the real world and so many of us never went back but stayed in touch with friends in other ways. I actually married and moved out of London not long after that.

Oh happy memories of very happy days and I'm still in touch with some very lovely special friends from way back then :-)
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I remember my first home......

Nissan hut, that's what these little buildings were called. Larger ones were barracks I think or some other use as they were quick and cheap to erect with just a brick front and back and corrugated tin bolted on over the top.

Smaller ones were used as temporary accommodation post 2nd world war.....my parents were eventually rehoused after 15 years in one of these so not as temporary as they were led to believe. This isn't a photo of our house as it looks like open countryside and we were in very built up London's East End.

I remember our street had about eight of these down one side with very little front gardens and a wooden picket fence with a front gate to separate them. Behind each one was the outside toilet. Inside was front door straight into the lounge with a kitchen area at one end and two doors into the bedrooms. We either used the tin bath in front of the fire or we had to visit the public baths (which I hated).

I can remember with a shudder how we were so scared of hail storms because of the noise made on a tin roof which was like being under attack. It also felt like living in an oven during hot summers.

By the time I was six years old there were seven of us living in this small two bedroom hut. Parents and our clothes storage in one bedroom and us four girls in the other bedroom and our new baby brother spending nights still in his pram in the lounge area.

To fit four beds into our room there were two singles and bunk beds. If you slept in the top bunk you could look through the crack in the door and watch tv so we organised ourselves into a weekly bed swap. Often the week after top bunk meant suffering conjuctivitis for a few days which seemed a fair trade off 😉 When I had chickenpox mum banned bed swapping as the sheets were getting covered in calamine lotion, so I got two weeks in the top bunk and loved it hahaha

I can remember the rehousing started at the other end of the road and as each hut emptied it was demolished until eventually we were the last one left and travellers had moved onto the waste land in their caravans and a few times we found a stranger using our outside toilet.

We were so excited when we were given a four bedroom house and I can remember my sisters and I moving our belongings one box at a time on the back of our three-wheel bike. Can't remember furniture moving day but I guess there was a van. Lovely to see our little baby brother having a cot to sleep in.

I'm the little curly one in the romper suit nearly two years old. 
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