There was no sort of ‘come on your nicked.’ Snowdrops were the military police that wore a white helmet. Another night we had a fight between the Yanks and the Canadians and Uncle Alf got on to the Snowdrops, they called them round King’s Cross Station, and they come round with a jeep and just chucked them in the jeep and that was it. ‘Cos the Yanks started up about bloody limeys and all like that, ‘Look at me I’m lovely’ and they’d throw the money on the counter and tell you to keep the change. Another night we had our soldiers in and the Yanks fighting. Aunt Bet sorted them out and chucked them out. Photo: SE I was in there one night when I was courting and two of the girls were shouting across to one another and all of a sudden glasses started coming over. The prostitutes were lovely girls, they really was. It wasn’t a comfortable place really, with the fights and the prostitutes. There were a few locals but it wasn’t the sort of pub where local could sit and drink properly, most people were passing through.
He lived above it, four bedrooms and a big living room, no garden, only a balcony at the back of the pub.Īunt Bet always said the pub was a finishing school. One day he went down the local and was chatting to the landlord, who said, why don’t you apply for a pub? So he gave up the carpentry and took over the Scottish Stores on the Caledonian Road in 1940. Photo owned by Warren Carter “Aunt Bet was my mum’s older sister and Uncle Alf was a carpenter.
The town is always the butt of jokes and ‘come friendly bombs’, but has always been a place where wave after wave of migrants go looking for work and that’s still going on today.”ĮXTRACT: Uncle Alf, Aunt Bet and The Scottish Stores – by Daisy Louisa Hunt (as told to grandson Warren Carter) Aunt Bet, Mary, Uncle Alf and Arthur. Many, like my Nan, eventually left London and she ended up on the Langley estate in Slough. One consequence of World War II was to bomb those communities apart as street after street was pulled down. There were gangs and looters who robbed people’s houses and shops when they had been bombed. “Some days London had smog so bad you couldn’t see in front of your face. “But I don’t want the past to be all rose-tinted either,” he says. Listening to his Nan’s stories made Warren realise that, despite its size, London was like a village where families lived together, neighbours married each other, kids played out in the streets and anything you needed to buy was no more than a couple of minutes walk away.
But then everybody has a story and anyone who lived in London through the Second World War certainly has – so at the age of 88 (she’s 92 now) and with an incredible memory for detail, I started to interview her.”
“Luckily for me, I realised that my Nan had a treasure trove to tell. “You don’t really think about listening to older people’s memories till it’s too late,” says her grandson Warren Carter, who has spent hours recording and transcribing her stories for the project. We were fascinated to discover the website, which contains memories from great grandmother Daisy Louisa Hunt on King’s Cross, growing up in the City of London, surviving the blitz, dodgy pubs and eventually moving to Slough.