大象传媒

My dad was on the Burma railways. They were always hungry, practically starving. One day he was talking to his neighbour - and he was saying that his favourite dinner was steak and kidney pudding, and that the place that the landlady at the boarding house he'd stayed in in England served the best pudding ever. My father asked where this was, and it turned out it was his mum's house, in Bedfordshire!

My gran's boarding house was near the barracks and I can remember going there in the evening when my mum worked nights. She was a crane driver in an engineering firm nearby. Us kids were sent to bed with candles, can you imagine that these days? But we didn't go hungry - as Gran ran the boarding house she got extra rations; we had an apple tree, chickens in the garden and we grew our own vegetables. Mum kept the apples under my bed so my room always smelt of apples. When the bombing raids were going on in London, the sky lit up red. Hundreds of planes were going over the house, the noise made the windows rattle. Mum used to put me under the table, as if that would have done any good!

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