THE gang of kids didn’t have a penny between them, but they were happy, running about in their street games or building toy houses and furniture from old bricks and scaps of metal.

Memories of the “great freedom”, somehow enjoyed during the dark days of the Second World War, are brilliantly recaptured by Teresa Platt.

Her grandson, Harrison loves listening to her when she reels out the stories from the past.

“He thinks I’m crackers”, she says with a smile, “especially when relating stories of childhood, like the way we played around the streets and how we ran for shelter during the bombing raids.

“His eyes go wider by the second when I tell him about wartime rationing - two ounces of butter, per person each week; four ounces of meat; the long queues for limited fruit and veg.”

“Oh what a shame, grandma, what a shame!” says Harry. “Yes, I say, ladling it on a bit thick.”

Teresa, from Baxters Lane, Sutton, never thought seriously about those hard-up times, until recently while sitting on the bus to town - her exercise for the day!

“The screaming babies, lying in a small pram on today’s overheated bus, dressed in Arctic gear, and with plastic covers over them. The young mums seemed to have forgotten to remove the covering while baby, a tiny thing, desperately tried to breathe.”

Reaching her destination, Teresa was confronted by screaming toddlers struggling to get out of their buggies which they seemed to have been harnessed into for hours at a time.

So different for Teresa’s own children, from the past, jumping up and down and singing innocent childish songs.

But back to grandson Harry. “Would he be surprised”, says Teresa, “if I told him how free we were during that terrible period in wartime history?

“How well I remember the rationing, yet I don’t recall suffering from hunger”, says Teresa. She remembers the cold snaps and sitting round a big, coal-fuelled fire, feeling warm and protected. And she remembers having no cash at all... “but who needed money when we were happily out at play?”

Tops and whips and tin-can bung off. Adventure games spread from Billy Woods’ field over to Sutton Moss where the kids would spend all day building tiny houses and furniture from old bricks and scrap.

“Yes”, says Teresa, “not a penny between us, just a happy group free to play all day with no fear of being snatched by the baddies.”

A copper or two would get the children into Sutton Bug (the old Empire cinema) to enjoy the serials and the cowboy films. The kids would spill out firing their imagined revolvers and attempting to speak cowpoke.

“I smile remembering my brother Mike, with his pal Albert Williams, walking up and down the street with his feet tightly squeezed into grandma’s boots and with some sort of silly hat covering his red curls. He’d shout, in a perfect John Wayne drawl, ‘You no-good two-bit bum! I orta fill ya fuller lead!’”

Still on the nostalgia link, Teresa looks back to herself, friend Margery Keenan and two cousins, Mary and Eileen, sitting on Mrs Keenan’s doorstep looking up to the moon and listening to a couple of local boys struggling to play a piano-accordion. “Trying to impress the girls, their voices were raised to the old ditty, The Lamplighter’s Serenade.”

And our long-memoried gran signs off: “Yes, Harrison, there was a war on, but we were more free than your generation will ever be!”