Free Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood by Jacky Hyams

was ignited from a pilot light inside when you wanted to run the tap for hot water. Those modern-day miracles cost about £10 each at the time – a few hundred pounds in today’s terms – so Molly considered herself lucky to have one in the bathroom. Kitchen hot water still came from saucepans heated on the gas cooker.
    Ascots were relatively new then. Introduced into Britain in the late thirties by a German company, for many people they were the first ever source of hot water ‘on tap’, so it’s nice to know that our country’s triumph over Hitler came with a nasty domestic sting in its tail: all over the land, families like ours in the post-war years regularly did battle with the temperamental device and its unpredictable on-off pilot light.
    The general idea was that you’d light the pilot light inside the Ascot with the manual push switch underneath. Then, in theory, the light would go on, ready to heat up the water. Alas, when you let go of the manual switch, the light would all too frequently flicker, weaken – and go off. So no hot water.
    ‘The pipe’s blocked up,’ said the man from the North Thames Gas Board when my mum managed to get him round after we’d valiantly endured our first lengthy running battle with the Ascot, hours of torture which resulted in nothing more than a cold bath.
    After what seemed like ages tinkering in the bathroom, he announced that he’d ‘done his best’.
    ‘If it keeps going out again, you could try lighting it yourself with a match,’ was his passing shot, a pretty useless piece of advice because it still didn’t work. Time and again, he’d come round, tinker and leave, whistling his way down the dirty stone stairs, his pockets bulging with my dad’s cash, our yearning for hot water on tap still largely unfulfilled. Since neither of my parents had a clue about anything remotely practical around the home we were, of course, sitting ducks for this ‘oooh, gonna cost ya’ type of situation.
    And so the nightly bathtime ritual when I was aged five or thereabouts went something like this. I’d stand there in the little bathroom in my pyjamas, watching and waiting, heart in mouth, as Molly, ever the optimist, would gingerly turn the manual push switch on. Ginger never got involved. He’d still be out ‘at work’ (a euphemism for the George and Dragon pub) most nights.
    Whooosh! The blue light had come on! Carefully, not daring to believe her luck, my mum would then turn the tap on. First a trickle, then a gush, yes! It was hot water! The prospect of a lovely hot bath, with me splashing around in delight, had me hopping up and down in anticipation.
    ‘Mum, Mum, it’s working, it’s working,’ I’d chirp.
    But my innocent joy was frequently short-lived. For, as we eventually learned, life with the Monster was never going to be as simple as that. Gradually, it dawned on us that once we’d watched the trickle turn to a flood, we could never risk leaving the bathroom to happily assume the flow of hot water from the Monster would result in a steaming hot bath. The Monster was far too cunning for that. If we stepped out to just leave it to its job, the Monster took umbrage. And it promptly stopped heating the water. All too often we’d nip back to the bathroom to find the light out, the water now tepid. Over and over again, our dreams of a hot bath were a fiasco, a disaster. The Monster was spiteful. It toyed with our hopes, our dreams, in a sadistic way. For while there were times when it let us have what we wanted, all too often the Monster won the war of nerves and didn’t perform. Welcome to the Ascot’s Revenge.
    And so I grew up understanding that to be really sure of a decent hot bath there was only one true way: you deployed endless saucepans of heated water, dashing back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom (one advantage of having such a pokey flat meant there was virtually no distance between the two), tipping the hot water into the bath,