大象传媒

I was born on January 24th 1937 in Greenwich Hospital.

My family lived in Poplar and Stepney, and in September 1939 my mother and I were evacuated to Nailsea in Somerset while my Dad went off to war. He was in Egypt.

When I was four I started school. You had to lie down in the afternoon for a sleep and one day a little voice, children being children, said: 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not meant to be here, you should be at the Londoners鈥� school.鈥� That was at the village institute but my mother being my mother had decided I was going to the proper village school.

We stayed at first with a family called Hobbs - Robert Hobbs used to have a big business with quarries. After that we moved to a succession of little cottages with no electricity or running water. One had a well and another had a water-pump, and at another place we had to take a bucket up the road and press a button. The loo was outside and for light at night we had candles and oil-lamps. I was 11 before we lived anywhere with electricity and running water.

One day my uncle came with a little dog which had been found wandering in London, presumably it had belonged to someone who was bombed out, so we acquired a dog.

At school if the air raid warning went we all had to dive under a big trestle table and at home if there was a chance of bombing we went and hid under the stairs with all the creepy crawlies and things so I didn鈥檛 like that much.

One day my mother was carrying me downstairs and a bomb dropped on Bristol and the vibration from that was so strong that it threw her down the stairs.

We went back to London to visit my grandfather who was in hospital and when we went back to the street we used to live our house was flattened. So we would have been dead if we鈥檇 stayed there. My mum always wanted to go back to London, she didn鈥檛 really like the country life, but somehow she didn鈥檛, and she stayed there till she died.

Dad was in the Army before the war and he was in the military police in Egypt. He had a motorbike and one day someone tried to steal the front wheel so when he tried to drive it he fell off onto his nose and broke it. That was his war wound!

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