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I can’t remember a year when I didn’t take part in, or at least watch a Service of Remembrance (you see, I am now in a wheelchair). On each occasion a unique mixture of happy, sad and nostalgic childhood memories have come flooding back. As the odd tear trickled silently down my face again this year, I remember how I have always been moved by the poignancy of the occasion. Makes you so proud to be British doesn’t it and I am so proud too, to belong to that special generation of ‘War Babies’. It has influenced my whole life, given me my value system - the way I see things- my chosen career and indirectly affected all the life choices I have made.

It was apparently, a perfect, warm summer evening in June when I was born in a Catholic hospital (pre NHS of course) - set in tranquil gardens on the outskirts of the City of Leicester. Apart from the silently gliding, caring nuns there was just Mum and me. Not Dad of course, because he was down in Portsmouth. Medically too unfit to serve abroad after a childhood of poor food and a lack of good health care, he nevertheless spent the whole of the war as a Private in the Army doing something I think with ammunition and anti-aircraft guns. At the time he hated it; he was homesick even though Mum knitted him socks and sent him food parcels, but I remember he spent the rest of his life – until he died prematurely in 1971 – reminiscing fondly about dangerous times, old comrades, tin hats, army food and the like!

They had married quite late he and Mum for those days, both in their 30s in 1936, but they delayed having children because of the threat - and then the actuality - of war. No-one thought it would last long, but when it did, they went ahead anyway. Mum was 38 and had a ‘bad’ time when I was born, so there weren’t any others. Just her and me – we became very close. And Dad - ‘that mans’ – I used to call him, as I got used to him coming home briefly and going away again. Then one day he came home in clothes I didn’t recognise and much to my dismay he didn’t go away again. Although we loved each other in a respectful sort of way, all my life there was a distance and a rivalry between us. Mum was in the middle, but I think she enjoyed the secret feeling of ‘power’ it gave her. The funny thing is that it was only when I gave Dad his grandchildren that I realised the bonding we had both missed …..

My big cot was upstairs in the large back bedroom that belonged to Mum and Dad, next to their bed with its crimson satin counterpane. For the first fifteen years of my life we lived in a traditional bay-windowed, three bed roomed pre war semi – rented in those days in a long street where all the houses looked much the same. But they all had enclosed front gardens (no garages) and, in the days when land was not at a premium, very long and spacious back gardens.

I can remember Mum sitting at the side of my cot with the light on in the middle of the night. We didn’t have an Anderson shelter but in any case Mum always had a fear of confined spaces. Most of the air raids we had were pilots who confused Leicester for Coventry, although we had a large factory half a mile away and one night they dropped a stick of bombs down there. Funny isn’t it that it’s only in the last few years that I have realised why I’ve always been frightened of the bangs and flashes of fireworks. Never could see them as celebratory – just Sparklers are OK.

I had a large coach built, shiny black pram with a well in the middle where you could dangle your feet. We walked everywhere, Mum and me, as there was very little public transport and no-one had cars. There was no petrol anyway. Grannie and Granpa (her parents) lived two streets away, other friends further, but you had to be home for the ‘blackout’. After the war we had acres of utilitarian black material which came in useful for all sorts of things – including fancy dress costumes at school!

Life with a baby was very lean by today’s standards. Nappies were sluiced out and then washed in a copper in the kitchen – a round cylindrical thing in which the water was heated once a week by a hand-lit gas burner. Everything happened in this kitchen – so small that we wouldn’t even consider it today as a bathroom. And this is only 60 years ago. Well, the story goes that I was conceived in front of the little gas fire in the kitchen. How I'm not quite sure!

I can quite distinctly remember being bathed in the kitchen sink. OK a butler type sink (I wouldn’t give one house room now), but this was in the days of coal fires,and very cold winters and long, long before the Romans’ system of central heating was re-invented! I remember too, having a very large enamel pottie. Mum was very keen on pottie-training. Not surprising, I guess given her domestic circumstances. I was told to sit on it and ‘do something’ before I was allowed off. She obviously saw this as ‘purgatory’ in an adult world. But I didn’t. As a child I developed a world of exploration hotching around between the aforesaid gas fire and its cables, and an intriguing double-fronted kitchenette cupboard . I soon learnt how to open the double doors of the latter and, guess what, in it I found Aladdin’s Cave . Inside was Mum’s secret store of ‘tins and things’.

Funny, isn’t that after living with us for five years before she died aged 83 we found the fitted wardrobes in her bedroom stuffed full of wartime rations – sugar, packet foods and the like. And no, before the thought even crosses your mind, she was not kept short of love or food, warmth or companionship.

I think I am a very balanced person these days, although I now suffer from a very serious illness. I have a good family,and I try to be tolerant and go with the flow. Not too rooted in the past. I guess many of us have to bite our lip and stay silent when the young ones moan! For us there were no disposable nappies, no jars of baby food. No, Mum cooked fresh food in those days, and mashed it up by hand. And no, no instant amusement – baby bouncers, Cbeebs and things. Well, I cut my TV teeth on black and white ‘Muffin the Mule’ and my favourite toy was a now racially unacceptable ‘golliwog’. I even had a metal golliwog brooch which I wore as a child with much pride.

You couldn’t get ‘toys’. My first (and much loved) dolly was made of rags and, in the evenings without TV we listened to the Bakelite radio on the sideboard or played games like Lexicon, Ludo, Snap or Consequences. And at Christmas, ‘Charades’. All always with huge gales of laughter, loving each other and sharing a sense of ‘belonging’ to family, community and a Nation.

Once a year we had our annual seaside holiday. –in Britain of course - for there were no flights to Spain in those days. Every year we went (by steam train) to Mrs Parry’s B&B just outside Cromer. She became part of our ‘family’ supplying comfortable accommodation, and dinner at 6.30pm at small tables with sparkling, starched white tablecloths in a dining room above the village post office, only a few yards from the path that led down through dunes to the beach. We always hired a beach hut there from Mr Brown-Something and dad had a meths stove which we would light inside the hut to make tea on windy days. Sounds a real fire hazard to me, but it was such fun.

On the days when we didn’t go to the beach we would catch a bus and then go for long walks. I remember those walks so well. Although the coils of barbed wire went quite quickly, the coastal pillboxes remained for many years on the edge of the beaches. Every year Mum used to explain their existence to me – and talk to me about ‘Germans’. But it’s only as I got older that I began to understand what she meant.

When war is over then everything is alright. But it isn’t, is it? Those of us that lived through the late 40s and early 50s can tell you that it isn’t. It takes a long while to heal all the wounds. I can remember Mum with dog-eared ration books, bartering and swopping coupons well into the fifties. We sadly, never seem to learn the lessons war teaches us, do we?

My Dad’s younger brother Len, was the healthiest and fittest and thus the most eligible of four to go. I have a faded old photo of a very young, fresh faced young man, with a whole life before him. He was killed by a land-mine on the assault in Italy in 1944.
Uncle Len, I never knew you, but the Italian hand-embroidered matinee coat you sent me from Italy is still in a treasured suitcase of baby clothes down in our cellar. And I am always so grateful, for you gave your Tomorrow that I could have my Today......I will make sure that the legacy you gave me is passed on to future generations.

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