大象传媒

My first memory is of my garden at home on Canvey Island Essex.
With my father we heard the aeroplane go overhead. I started to cry. Daddy wanted to know why my answer was Won't we have any more bananas. The next event I can recall happened a few weeks later that daddy was not at home. My older brothers and sister said he had gone to work. They told me to open my bedroom curtains because I had slept right through an air raid. For once I did as I was told only to find there was a very large hole. A long time seems to pass by, because my two eldest brothers are now in the army. I have taken my English scholarship exam in an air-raid shelter and I am now living on the other side of the island, having been evacuated there to go to the only Grammar School on the island. I only went to that school for three weeks. Our home circumstances had changed once again. We were now (that is my youngest brother, Mum and myself) living inone room, having moved from a house owned by a farmer that we rented on condition that my two eldest brothers were in his employment. As already stated this was no longer the case. The upshot of all this was that my Mum told me that I was getting too old to share a bedroom with my youngest brother and I was going to live with my cousin and my aunt and uncle in Margate. This however did not materialise and after a few weeks, I learned that I was to go to a convent boarding school in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where I spent the next seven years. Returning to London at the age of seventeen to become a junior barrister's Clerk. Thus began my adult life which certainly has so far had ;more than its fair share of tragedies, triumphs and traumas - to be continued at a later date!

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