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I was three and a half years old when my mother received the telegram telling her my father had been killed in France. It was March 1940 and he had been in France when war broke out in 1939. My eyes were level with the dining room table and I remember seeing her tears landing in puddles on the brightly polished surface of the table. We were very poor and she was afraid the landlord would throw us out if she couldn’t pay the rent, so we left the house as it was, she wasn’t thinking straight I fear, and we went and stayed in one room in a relative’s house temporarily. I remember her shooing the cat away as it couldn’t come with us. Shortly afterwards she joined the ATS and placed me in an orphanage run by nuns in Aldershot, where she was stationed — I stayed there until I was six, when she took me away as I was always hungry and not very well looked after. I was looked after by a succession of different people after that. When was ended in 1945 she met and married my stepfather in 1947 and for the first time in my life I had a proper home. I was eleven years old when she re-married. A sad story, which I fear has had a marked effect on my life.

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