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I was 18 months old when the war broke out, living in Cranford near what is now Heathrow. My father joined up on the day war was declared, and was terrified as he walked home to his wife and two children for almost the last time, he feared, as white mist swirled round him and he thought it was poisonous gas — it was just mist off the gravel pits which are now under runway four of Heathrow!

We were evacuated twice — the first time after our house was partially bombed — down in Devon. My mother had to struggle with a suitcase, a two year old and a four year old on a journey that took fifteen hours — the only toy I could take was a velvet pig, Mrs Trotters, who I still have. We were landed on a family who did not want to take evacuees and where the man was dying of cancer. He hated my poor brother and really persecuted him, so my mother sent him as a weekly boarder at the local public school and I can remember being lifted up and talking to him through the railings.

When our house was bombed I was inside it, in a shelter like a steel table with a top and bottom and thick chicken wire round the edges — my mother had put me asleep inside this sort of cage and rushed to collect my brother who was playing two doors up at my cousins house. The bomb followed the air raid warning immediately and the house was bombed before she got back. I slept through it all, but as she waited for me to be dug out her hair turned completely white — she was 29 years old.

When the house was repaired we came back from Devon and had US airmen billeted on us — I wrote to one of their daughters for years following the war. I loved it and we were taken to the PX — the force’s café at the base of Heathrow and had ICE CREAM — no one I knew had ever tasted ice cream before. We had meat too — at that time of rationing you only had it once a week. When the V2 rockets came there was so much bombing again and the houses opposite us were completely destroyed. I remember being very shocked when our neighbours were lying dead in the road — I was shocked because their clothes had been blown up and they were naked grown ups rather than because they were dead — so many people were dying and losing members of their families. My mother took us away as evacuees again to Frampton Mansell in the Cotswolds — lovely country but living with two chapel going maiden ladies who found children and Londoner’s very difficult. We had to walk four miles to chapel twice every Sunday and once on Wednesday evenings. My mother, brother and I had to share a single bedroom. The food was wonderful compared to London on rations — we had bacon and eggs not whalemeat and spam and loads of fresh fruit in the summer.

In the last year of the war we went back home, to find our house had been trashed and everything of any value stolen and sold by the Polish airman who had been put there by the authorities. No bills had been paid either, and it took my mother six weeks to get the force’s to sort it out, we camped out with relatives.

My father, who need never have been in the RAF at all as he was blind in one eye, had been working in the very first radar station and was sent to France on the second day of the D-Day landings to set up a station behind the lines there — we had no news for six weeks and my mother was terrified. However she was such a wonderful parent I had no feeling of insecurity through all of this, and remember my childhood as golden and exiting. I even enjoyed the orange juice, cod liver oil and Robbeleine the malt extract we were all given through the clinics. I Can remember the horrid smell of the underground shelters — all wet mud and comics which were developing mildew and also that the boys were allowed to play out on the bombsites which were full of bricks and broken pipes and the girls were not! I am so grateful that all of my family survived — I could never get my father to talk about France at the end of the war — he said he had gone to protect my mother and us children from the horrors of war and he would not bring those memories into our home.

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