I'm 76 now. In the early thirties when I was five years old, wrote Mark Rickman who was born in Stepney, my father taught me that our community, the comrades of the working class, was a seething bubbling mass of rebellion.

Workers wore overalls and lived in a dark cauldron of misery. When we were not slaving our guts out in some evil capitalist's factory, we fought to lift the lid of the cauldron in a vain attempt to get a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the sun.

On the lid and keeping the workers in their place, sat the capitalist class. Capitalists wore top hats, black swallowtail coats, and striped grey trousers. I was too young to distinguish between male and female capitalists so, although I knew whiskers were masculine, to my mind the clothing was identical and so were their pot bellies, swollen of course with the profits wrung from the working class.

My grandmother, on the other hand, taught me that our community was an extended family of relatives, friends, and the bookie's runner (illegal but a common sight before betting shops), who stood outside Grandpa's tailoring workshop taking sixpenny bets.

My younger brother and I, our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, their married partners, and various cousins lived in three terraced houses in Broomhead Street, a part of London's East End. Front doors were left open, the feeling being that if a burglar found anything worth stealing, he could share it with Grandpa.

We children had the run of the houses, and I remember my mother in hysterics when a newly married uncle chased me along the street and into our kitchen to tell me not to keep running in and out of his bedroom. 'Because,' he bellowed, 'your aunt and I might have been reading a book or something!'

All the adults in the family worked in the clothing trade: many of the men as machiners on piece work which, even though it meant treadling pre-electric sewing machines for up to fourteen hours a day, was preferred to an hourly rate of pay.

Women were sewing hands and buttonhole makers, often ruining their eyesight by stitching black on black in poor light, cigarette fumes, and stinky steam from the wrung out damp cloths of the pressers.

Our local optician had an extra chart of Noah's Ark animals for 'foreigners' and the illiterate. The clothing trade was seasonal and so were the wages, workers alternating between being flush or skint.

Skint meant surreptitious visits to Grandma, who could always find a few coppers or an egg and onion sandwich to keep body and soul together, and a 'bugger off out of here' when anyone tried to thank her.

Skint also meant the Communist Party and talk of revolution, red flags and Russia. Though why the coming revolution would make people buy more clothes and keep dad and the rest of the family in work was never made clear. At least, not to me.

Looking back, I can see that both communities involved the same people with many of the same aims. Kids should do well at school (mothers said to get a good job, fathers said to face down the bosses). The butcher, baker, grocer, milkman, tallyman and the burial society man had to be paid, even when the down-at-heel rent collector wasn't (he represented the capitalist landlords).

Entertainment for the adults, apart from playing cards and listening to the radio, was the Saturday night hop. For kids there were comics, roller skates, scooters, hoops, and watching fights outside the pub on a Friday night.

For the family it was going to the theatre to see six acts including Borominovitch and his harmonica rascals, after which we pestered our parents for mouth organs that we never did learn to play.

By 1936, Hitler, Mussolini, Moseley and the Spanish Civil War were closing in on us. Then came the Second World War that saw almost every male member of the family, including me, in the Services.

Air raids destroyed much of the East End and killed or dispersed many of its then inhabitants. Broomhead Street has gone, along with Grandpa's workshop and the bookie's runner who once promised to teach me his trade.

So has my family gone, but they live on in blessed memory. If home is truly where the heart is, mine lies in the rubble of three shabby, terraced houses tucked away in London's East End.

Mark Rickman, London, 2002