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I was 4 years old in 1939 and was evacuated during the war, sent to a village called Stoke Lynn, near Bicester, Oxford. I was an only child and was sent to stay with an elderly couple. He was an army captain in the First World War and very strict. It was a small village, everyone knowing everyone. I went to school in the village — 20 in the infants, 20 in the juniors, all in one building.It was a farming community and I used to collect the milk from the farm in a silver churn, it was still warm from the cow.
In 1945 aged 10 I came home because we were told the war was over. I got a cab to Bicester and a train to London where my parents met me. There were houses with no roofs hit by bombs and caught fire — something I had not seen in Oxford.After about a week of being home a flying bomb dropped in our road, I was running for the shelter and was blown off my feet. My mother who was pregnant with my sister didn’t get to the shelter. She was kept in hospital for a few days, luckily not badly hurt.A few months later we had a street party at the end of the war.

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