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One of the things that I remember was the time my brother and I caught impetigo — a very contagious disease.

We had it all over our heads and faces. The remedy for getting rid of this was to cover the sores with this blue stuff — we looked terrible so my mum made us put on balaclavas. This was a knitted hat that covered all of our heads and left just openings for our mouths and eyes. We were not allowed to go to school.

The next thing we caught was scabies and this again was a very contagious disease. We had to go to the baths in Walthamstow High Street where they strapped us down and scrubbed us with large scrubbing brushes. Then they covered us with a coating of some cream. It made our skin very sore.

I don’t know much about what my mother had to put up with. All I know is that she had to bring up three very young children. In the early part of the war (1940 — 1941) we slept in our clothes for months on end. In our shelter she would probably have had trouble keeping us fed and doing the washing. As many times the water was short due to the bombing and we didn’t have washing machines.

She had a mangle out in the garden and we had a back boiler so she would have had to have boiled water to do her washing. I think she had a terrible job keeping up with us — as boys we were always so filthy and so were our clothes.

I know we were always hungry and were perhaps undernourished and so were up for any diseases that were around and also were not getting very much sleep

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