Childhood Memories

Childhood Memories
I was a sickly child, suffering greatly from wind, Mother always approached me with a clothes peg on her nose. We had few visitors to our home. Most evenings we ate a simple traditional East-end meal of boiled eggs and pickled onions

I remember the first day I started school, Mother had worked so hard on that uniform and those shoes, cutting and stitching canvas can't be easy.

My best friend was a fly I called Peter. I found him living amongst the eggs and pickled onions in my lunch box , he'd joyfully buzz and bounce around inside that old lunch box. Until, one day after a light snack I forgot to shut the lid properly, Peter escaped and was quickly swatted by Mr Jenkins our history teacher.

Break times meant playing a game that if I'm honest I was never that keen on. All the kids world gather at the opposite side of the play ground to me and hurl sticks, stones and the occasional brick in my general direction, the object of the game was to see if I could avoid any direct hits. I soon became an expert at dodging stuff, a skill I've found useful all through life.

Our home was in a small terraced house on Valance road in the East end of London. Mother and myself occupied two rooms on the ground floor. Below us, the basement was used by two blokes who looked exactly the same as each other. They did not actually live in this basement but used it exclusively for business meeting, these business meetings usually occurred in the dead of night and involved a lot of screaming an begging for mercy.