大象传媒

Although I was sent to Watford ( where the bombs were worse!) while my mother was giving birth to my brother (in 1944) we were all in London during the war. I remember the Ministry of Food in Finchley Road where one official was so rude and cruel to my heavily pregnant mother that she burst into tears and threw a bottle of orange juice at him! People would see me in my pram see she was pregnant and insult her, saying she ought not to be having children at such a time.

I remember that the ration books and identity cards were kept in the kitchen drawer under the cutlery drawer. The kitchen had been painted white but immediately turned margarine colour. The worst thing about London during and postwar, apart from the bombs and bomb damage, was the drabness. Before the invention of titanium oxide as a paint additive, all white paint turned yellow almost immediately it was put on the wall, especially in dirty, polluted London. Although this was before the big smogs, lots of people burned coal and a pall of smoke hung over everything.

A bomb fell opposite John Barnes in the Finchley Road, in 1943, the blast was so powrful it knocked my brother's carrycot from the sofa, where it was sitting, on to the floor. I was out in the pram with my grandmother at the time. My mother was sure she would never see us again. My grandmother walked in looking shaken and my mother asked her "What did you tell Josephine?" My grandmother replied "I told her it was a car backfiring". My mother looked at me and could see that I was finding it hard to believe.

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