The Nigerian Chief who bought our house in London in 1974 was a prolific tea drinker. In fact he was making tea the day I visited him 10 years after he had purchased the property. Although he had been an avid trade unionist during his student days in England, meeting politicians like Fenner Brockway, when it came to tea he was very conservative. For instance, every day had to start with a cup of tea. It had to have in it milk and 2 lumps of sugar. In Nigeria, the houseboy prepared it. In England, he was happy to brew himself, proudly, as he poured me a cup.

I noticed in the kitchen, where he usually entertained guests, that the books on the shelf when we sold the Chief the house, were still there, having been placed there 24 years previously. Some of those were in German, like a Dictionary, which he had never opened, and never would. I commented on it, and he remarked that he did not like to change things that were in place.

On the question of tea, I explained to the Chief that drinking a cup of tea had strange memories for me. I told him that I was 6 years old when I had my first cup of tea, and what was it that prompted it? The war!

Tea and bombs don't quite go together. After all, tea is a beverage meant to relax; bombs, not so. They are meant to kill and strike fear.

The two came together with a vengeance during the Second World war. I was then in the kitchen and vividly remember Mr. Chamberlain on September 3rd, 1939 informing the British people that they can consider themselves at war with Nazi Germany. A few weeks later we began to hear for the first time the sound of siren warnings, the forerunner of what we were to hear every night during the Blitz of London. That started a year later. The Government began issuing all kinds of instructions like ordering us to put black-out material on our windows so that at night no speck of light would be visible from the outside of houses. Recognising the importance of a cuppa, there are reports that the Government bought the entire world's supply of tea.

We occupied the top two stories of a 3 story house in North London. Downstairs lived Mr. and Mrs. Engel. I do not remember their first names except that Mrs. Engel referred to her husband as Engeline. She was a caring kind of person and, the day after the first air raid, she urged my mother to bring her family down to the ground floor to make use of the banister as a place to shelter from future raids. My father had been appointed an air raid warden. He had to patrol the streets to report anyone whose lights were visible and to look for Germans in case they had parachuted to the ground. The air raids began in September 1940. They were a nightly occurrence, often starting at around 1 a.m.

First, we would hear the sirens warning us of an imminent air raid, followed a little later by the distant drone of plane engines coming closer and closer. Then the guns on Hampstead heath would blast into action lighting the sky with searchlights to pinpoint the planes. By the time that we heard the crash of the first bomb, my mother, my brother, Henry, and I was safely ensconced under the banisters waiting out the raid. It usually lasted about an hour.

The end of the raid brought a big sigh of relief. We had not been hit! We could relax, and it became customary for Mrs. Engel to emerge from her kitchen with a tray of piping hot cups of tea for all four of us. I was not used to drinking tea, but as time went on, we came to be almost looking forward to the next air raid, so that we could enjoy another cup of Mrs. Engels's as we relaxed under the banisters after a typical raid. Eventually, Henry, who was five years older than me, decided he would soldier it out on the top floor as he needed the sleep, and the time spent downstairs was intruding on it. Me? I stayed. I thought it was fun!

Mrs. Engel usually stayed behind and chatted with us until we were ready to go back upstairs and use the time left to catch up on our sleep. One of those nights I joined in the conversation in quite an animated way using some new swear words I had learned at School. I have always remembered the dressing-down I received from her. As a result, I am always very careful of my choice of words, to this day.

How Mrs. Engel did it, I do not know, because from the beginning of 1949, that is, four months after Chamberlain's declaration of war, tea became rationed to two ounces per person per week. Of course, we all pooled our resources. As time progressed, and before the end of 1940, the nightly raids became more intense and longer. The Government supplied us with Morrison shelters. This was a metal shelter big enough for two or three people to crawl into. Ours was placed against the wall in the hallway. My brother, Henry, continued to take his chance upstairs in the comfort of his bed.

One night, the planes seemed to be targeting our area. What they were looking for nobody could conjecture because there was nothing around worth bombing. The only building of note was the Catholic Church. Blocking our view of the Church was a large house, and we each had about 100 feet of garden backing onto each other. So our house was just under 300 feet from The Church. A few miles to the north was Hampstead Heath. home to the detachment of anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. The guns came into play as soon as the enemy planes came within range. The first time I heard those guns I thought the world was being blown to pieces. As the planes arrived, off went the guns, boom boom, crash bang. The wall of the house shook and anything loose tumbled to the ground. Undeterred, a bomb came crashing to the ground and exploded so loud it seemed it was either us or the house next door that had been hit. It was a frightening night.

By 4 a.m., all was quiet again. My mother and I were quite shaken. We thought our turn had come. Mrs. Engel did not bring us tea as she normally did. She was also shaken. It was near to 5 a.m. when she arrived with our tea.

"They got the house on the corner," she told us. "It's all but destroyed. It was such a nice house out there on Finchley Road.

Don't know if anyone was in it yet."

That house was next to the one behind us, the one opposite the Catholic Church. The tea that night was especially welcome. It helped soothe our fraying nerves.

It was during this raid that marauding planes took out the School that Henry and I had been attending. The next morning I went to take a look. But I did not get there. I had been in the habit of collecting shrapnel following an air raid, particularly the larger pieces. That morning there was so much of it lying around I became overwhelmed with it.

Planes flying overhead, merely the drone of the engines, is enough to frighten the daylights out of one; grown-ups, that is. I was just a kid and I could never imagine that our house could receive a hit from a bomb. After all, there were so many houses in our street, why pick on ours? I had become accustomed to the nightly disturbances, the waking up with the noise of the sirens, the anti-aircraft guns, the listening for the engines of the planes, and the aftermath of the raid when the all-clear siren went off. We did occasionally have air raids in the daytime, but clearly, the enemy planes did not relish this type of raid as they were sitting ducks for the Spitfires that chased the hell out of them.

Eventually, as the war continued, we were faced with a different set of noises. Instead of bombers, or in between the sounds of them, we started to hear the screeching of dive bombers. Now, the noise of a dive bomber swooping down seemingly just above the top of our chimney was definitely frightening, even to me. They sounded so close I thought they were going to crash into the house. I am surprised I can still hear reasonably well because the combined din of guns firing full-blast and planes screeching down on you was enough to blow out your eardrums for good.

The end of the Blitz in May 1941 signaled a welcome hiatus for a few years until a different droning noise filled us with new apprehension. The doodlebug; a pilotless bomb, that had been designed, destined, and timed, to drop off somewhere in London.

They were a forerunner to the arrival of the V2 rocket bomb which came from nowhere not advertising its arrival until it hit whatever target was in its way.

I was evacuated to Stockport for a short while during this episode of the war. The kind folks into whose house my mother and I were billeted (the official wartime term for housed), plied us with endless cups of tea in the belief that our nerves needed shoring up.

Since the end of the war, I have not drunk much tea, switching instead to coffee.

The Chief? He has never stopped. I visited him in Lagos, and there he was, first thing in the morning, sitting at the breakfast table with his cup of tea, listening to the BBC news.

Last year, he sold the house in London. Shortly after, he died of the covid in a hospital in Lagos. He was 94. It is reported that he was holding a cup of tea in his hands as he passed.

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