My life on Canvey 1948 to 1970 by Eddie Terry
CANVEY AS I REMEMBER IT - EPISODE Seven

"In recalling memories the past you do tend to forget about the sometimes mundane things that you had to do and only remember the good things, one of the tasks my brother and I had to do in the early fifties was as follows.
In those early years on Canvey there were quite a few houses with no main sewer and our job was to dig a rather large hole (about 18 inches square and 4 to 5 feet deep) in which to tip the bucket when it got full, now we lived on a corner block with a lot of passing pedestrians so one of us kept a lookout whilst the other grabbed the bucket from under the seat, ran around to the garden, tipped it in and rushed back before anyone saw you and the lookout would then cover the hole up with a sheet of corrugated iron.
When the hole was nearly full it was backfilled and a new hole dug with the old one being marked by a stick so you would not dig in the same place again. Now this system did have it's pitfalls as sometimes the stick would disappear and you would be walking on the garden when you would slowly start to sink into the earth which meant a quick leap to the side or a very smelly disaster would occur."

"What a relief when we had the sewer connected and you could pull the chain.
Also I'm not too proud to say that I also wore clothes bought from the Salvation Army jumble sale (and so did hundreds of other Canvey kids in those years as the hall was always full of mums buying clothes) and I sometimes wore Shredded Wheat shoes (does anybody remember them??)
My mum did a fantastic job in bringing up us five kids under difficult times in London during the blitz and on Canvey after the war, on top of this she was widowed whilst still in her early forties with two of my young sisters still at school and she still found time to foster babies from Doctor Barnardo's home.
They may have come bigger than my mum but they did not come better.

Although the Rio cinema had a Saturday morning matinee for kids most of us opted for the cinemas in Southend, either the Strand near the railway station or the Gaumont cinema up near Victoria Circus now this cinema was an old one with a "Gods" (those who don't Know what the Gods are I will explain, the ground floor of the cinema was the stalls the next two levels were the circle and the dress circle and right at the very top was the Gods) miles from the screen, the seats set very steep so those at the back could see, and to get up there you had to walk up dozens of steps, and any object dropped accidentally from it took quite a while to reach the stalls."

The Rio Cinema today

"Now because it was very tiring to climb up into the Gods the usherettes very rarely came up there so we virtually had the run of the place.
One of our favorite tricks was to blow up a French letter to a huge size , then release it to float gently down through the beam of the film where it appeared on the screen looking like a huge zeppelin. We also filled them up with water and dropped them from the balcony.
It is also unbelievable how much water you can get into the aforementioned item.
On the few occasions when we did go to the Rio Cinema very few of us paid as the following system was carried out.
One of our number would pay the admission fee and then go inside and sit by the side door, when the lights went out he would then creep up to the side door and give the bar a push and the other members of our group would rush in and sit down all in different places. The usherettes would come down and maybe find a couple of non-payers and eject them and the rest would enjoy the film.
This trick was difficult to stop as, by law, the side doors must always be left unlocked during performances for safety reasons."