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I was born in Croydon, South London on 11 May 1940 the day after Hitler began the second world war on the western front. My mother was born and brought up in Norbury where her parents continued to live. My father, who during the war was a an officer in the RAF came from the north Oxfordshire village of Kirtllngton and had moved to Croydon before the war to take up a teaching post. I particularly remember life under the Morrison shelter that had been assembled in the kitchen. My mother, sister, born in 1943 and I slept under this shelter as did from time to time, my mothers parents friends and neighbours. We ate meals on top of the shelter. As a treat I was given powdered drinking chocolate to eat by the spoonful. When Hitler launched the V1’s we found we were under their flight path and my mother used to watch them going past from the kitchen window. As her first husband had been killed in a road accident a few years before within weeks of their wedding I think she had a fatalistic approach to life. She took the view that either the ‘doodlebugs’ would fly over or they would drop on you and there was nothing you could do about it. I also recall going to London just after the war to see one of the terrible V2 rockets. I clearly remember the air-raid sirens, the warning wail and then the ‘all clear’. The four houses next door to us were completely destroyed by bombs; all that was left was rubble. Our house suffered only broken windows.
We were away at the time staying in Kirtlington, which we did periodically, particularly when my father was based at Bicester. His mother did not actually live in the village as she ran a canal side pub called The Three Pigeons. This was very remote and the village could only be reached by an appalling road, Mill Lane that had never been properly maintained.
’ Buses to Oxford were very infrequent. There was a tiny railway station, Tackley Halt, in use to this, day a mile or so away across the fields, and another station at Bletchingdon best reached by walking along the railway line.
The Pigeons was on something of an Island with the canal at
the front and the River Cherwell at the back. It had no running water, only a pump in the kitchen that delivered a pint of water with every pull, no gas or electricity and no bathroom or inside lavatory. I loved it there. It was a pub for local farm workers and boat people with stables for the boat horses. It was there that I acquired my love of canals and narrow boats which has remained undiminished

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