Yes, it’s time once again for … ‘Swing the light and I’ll tell you a war story’ … Well sort of …

The above photograph shows me, but not the actual street where I lived, but it very well could be, for a similar view awaited anyone stepping out of our front door during the London ‘Blitz’, as the ten or so terraced houses on the opposite side of the road were destroyed by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. 

Of course I was very young at the time and have no memory of those events, but I do have very clear memories of the ‘bomb site’ that was created, as it became my favourite playground during the later war years and the early postwar period …

Although most of the houses were reduced to piles of rubble, one fire gutted house remained standing, although the roof and floorboards were missing. It was the scene of many adventures and not a few injuries as balancing along broken joists two floors up could easily lead to broken bones upon landing in the basement, and climbing a frayed rope up crumbling brickwork was a sure way to end up bleeding all over your mum’s freshly scrubbed doorstep as she surveyed the scruffy little wreck who stood before her needing a hug and some first aid.

Together with my young mates I made camps among the ruins, searched for ‘shrapnel’ and unexploded incendiary bombs (thank God we never found any). We did collect quite a lot of metal, but I expect that most of it was bits of old gas pipes and the expended machine gun bullets that we found were probably large rusty bent nails; although I do remember some older boys ‘firing’ live .303 rounds using a length of pipe and a hammer. There was quite a bit of  weaponery around at the time, and I know that it’s hard to believe, but just after of the war ended our little gang had a redundant ‘Bren’ light machine gun in it’s possession plus a number of less lethal items of military equipment.

Weapons of a more ancient kind, but no less dangerous, were favoured for our games of ‘Robin Hood’ or ‘cowboys and indians’ and bamboo arrows flew all over the ruins. The bamboo sticks were ‘borrowed’ from back yard vegetable patches and allotments, with the longer bean poles going to make quite powerful long bows. Luckily, as I recall, no one lost an eye, although I did get a thick ear from a ball bearing fired from a catapult (slingshot).

We built fires and sat amongst the debris eating slices of bread and ‘dripping’ held in our grubby little hands and I suspect that we swallowed almost as much dirt as we did fat. It was all washed down with swigs from a bottle of cold tea. If we were very lucky we might share a bottle of ‘Tizer’.

Due to rationing, sweets (candy) were a rare treat, but if you had a penny or two, ‘black market’ varieties were available from ‘Artful Dodger’ older kids. I dread to think what they contained. They mostly tasted of liqourice and mothballs and turned your tongue blue or green.

When I look back at those times I can’t help but think that I was probably in as much danger from playing with my friends as I was from Hitler’s ‘Doodlebug’ missiles which somtimes passed overhead.

All the kids in my street ‘played out’ almost from ‘dawn ’til dusk’, so it is hard to imagine what it must be like for some children today when I read that seven out of ten parents in this country would not let their offspring out of the house to play ‘unsupervised’, and that more than half of youngsters today have no knowledge of traditional playground games and have never ridden a bike.

I’ve heard today’s children described as the ‘cotton-wool generation’. I guess that cotton-wool …

…    must have been ‘on ration’ in my young days. 

Today very few men wear hats, unless it is that American import, the baseball cap, or perhaps a woolen ‘tea cosy’ pulled down over their ears in winter.

To me the baseball cap always looks somehow out of place on the more mature Englishman (although, on occasion, I have been known to wear one), and looks completely ridiculous when worn at all angles on the heads of the ‘hip hop’ generation.

In my youth the flat cap was worn by many men and was still very much a symbol of the ‘working class’ in this country, as it had been in my father’s day when just about everyone wore one, including children, as shown in the picture of my uncle Alf (right) which was taken during the 1920s . Even my grandmother is said to have worn a man’s cap (with hatpin) in the early days of the last century.

My dad wore a flat cap for all of the fiftyone years that he worked as a railway carpenter, as you can see from the photographs of him taken during the 1930s. He is the one with the saw, and the one (top left) sitting in front of the two ‘dodgy’ looking characters, who I guess were his mates at the time.

Today the few people who wear caps include my old git ‘hero’ Victor Meldrew  (may he rest in peace), and that prize prat Charlie when his valets dress him up to go pissing about in the countryside.

Somehow I can’t see the old cloth cap coming back in a big way, although flat caps of a sort have been seen in recent years as fashion accessories worn by the likes of Madonna, Kate Moss and the movie star Samuel L. Jackson, although he looks almost as big a prat as our ‘clown prince’ as he insists on wearing his back to front ! … These caps are normally of the ‘cheese cutter’ design and are not to be confused with the ‘classic’ British working man’s cap of yesteryear, which had a rather large circular low crown with a stiff peak which was attached to the overlapping front of the soft crown by a press stud. The cap was made of woollen cloth or tweed and not some fancy soft fabric, tartan or leather.

In the past men had caps for work and ones that were for ‘Sunday best’ and holidays, but they were all made of the same thick material and hardly what you would call ideal beachwear; but this did not seem to bother my dad as he sat with my mother (dark dress) on the sands at Margate in 1927.

I have a rather smart tweed ‘Country Club’ cap,which is nothing like the cap worn by my father, but I’m sure that he wouldn’t object if I raised it now and then to the likes of him and his fellow working men of that …

…        almost forgotten cloth cap era.