[Syd Foley describes the contentment of the household bedtime routine, including the nit comb]

I did not care anyway, as long as  Mum was combing my hair […]  [My sister] Flo went in the back room to sit with Gran Smith. I got into the bottom end of the little bed and arranged my legs along the wall so as to leave room for Flo at the top end. 

It was warm and cosy […] I could hear Flo’s clear young voice, and Gran Smith’s grumpy answers. Downstairs Uncle Bob’s gramophone boomed on. When I left school, I would be a dustman, too, and I would have a gramophone and sit listening to it in my socks, and smoke my woodbines.  Everything was going to be alright; we were all going to live like this nearly for ever; nothing was going to change.