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I was born in April 1933 in Maida Vale, London. When I was three my parents divorced and I was only to see my father on a few occasions after this. My mother took a job at GEC to keep us and as there were no day nurseries in Wembley, where we were then living, she had to send me to a boarding school in Virginia Waters. This was a big shock to me after losing my father, then to see my mother infrequently,as her only way of visiting was on public transport every three or four weeks. In the autumn of 1938 when I started infant school at 5 yrs old in Wembley my Grandma came to live with mother to care for me after school until mother returned from work.
In April 1939 I was 6 and people knew that there was going to be a war soon. The GEC had gone over to wartime work. As the summer came the Government decided that all children in the London Boroughs would be evacuated en masse from London through their schools in September. As we were 3 miles outside the boundary and in Middlesex, this didn't apply to my school and parents were told that they could make their own arrangements if they wished or keep their children with them. My mother knew a lady who had a 4yr old boy Peter and through contacts of hers it was arranged that in August we should both go to Aylesbury, Bucks to a woman who was in her 50's. This lady didn't want evacuees, and had no children of her own, but as she had plenty of room in her house had to take children. She was paid 10 shillings (50p) each per week for us. We arrived with our cases, gas masks and luggage labels. Peter's mother was worried about him being away from home for the first time but my mother said that I was used to being away and would look after him for her. This I had to do. We hated her and she hated us. We got told off for everything and were always hungry. Peter cried all day and most of the night. In fact things got so bad that she got permission for him to go to the local primary school with me and sit beside me all day as the only time he was silent was when we were together. We shared a double bed and Peter, because he was upset, often wet the bed. The strange thing was I never noticed it when he did it but only during the night when his side of the bed became very cold as well as wet. Next day we were both in trouble. After the first month when my mother came for a visit I smuggled a cardboard tub of biscuits into the bed and hid them and each night we used to have one each. We thought we had got away with this but crumbs were discovered in the bed and the biscuits found and confiscated. Another couple of months went by and Peter's mother came and fetched him home to London. He told her that he would rather face Hitler than that woman.. I heard her telling a neighbour one day that I was a trouble maker and she wanted to get rid of me and she got a note from the doctor that she was ill with nerves and unable to have any more evacuees and without letting my mother know found a policeman and his wife in another part of town who were willing to take me and just took my possessions round with me. It wasn't until my mother's next visit that she found out that I had been moved on. I wished then that I had been evacuated with my school as at least I would then have had other children I knew or a teacher to talk to instead of feeling so much alone.

The new people were a couple in their late 30's and were very quiet but kind. He was interested in sketching and used to sketch me sometimes. Unfortunately after a couple of months they found out that the police were not allowed to have evacuees for some reason and they were obliged to find me a new home. They sent me round the corner to a lady in her 50's who had a father in his 70's living with her and I called them Aunt Lucy and Gramps. The first thing I noticed about Aunt Lucy was that she had the little finger of her left hand missing. She said she had cut it on a tin of condensed milk. I always remembered that. Gramps had a long narrow garden at the back of the house and besides growing lots of vegetables and puffing his pipe in the house, his other hobby was keeping rabbits (for the war effort and extra food). He had a lot of hutches. These were a source of great curiosity to me and I was always going down the garden and opening the doors to have a look. He kept telling me off because he said the does would eat their young if I interfered so much with them. After a few weeks there he told his daughter that it was "rabbits or evacuees" - she couldn't take both and needless to say the rabbits won. Years later when I went back to see them and he was 90 he asked me if I had come back to torment his rabbits.

A few doors down on the opposite side of the road lived Lucy’s sister Polly. She was a large lady and very jolly. Her boys had grown up and married but she still had a daughter (Doris) at home. They felt sorry for me and took me into the fold of the family for two and a half years, where I had the happiest days of my childhood.
Doris was 20 and I was still 6 and we shared a bed together. They always referred to me as "our kid". Doris had a sharp tongue but a very kind heart. She used to tell me off for wriggling in bed or being in the scullery when she wanted to get in first for a wash, but as a local Guide Captain got me into the brownies and managed to get me a uniform from somewhere. She took me up to the top of Wendover Hills to the South African War Memorial to gather bluebells and never forgot my birthday. When I was 7 I remember waiting to see Father Christmas on Christmas Eve, and hearing the door open and someone put a pillowcase on the end of the bed and in the light from the hall downstairs as she went out I suddenly realised that Father Christmas was Doris. She had married in December 1939 to Eddie and he was also good to me, and I liked to sit on his lap and he would read to me, but as soon as they were married he left to join the army but when he came home on leave I had to go into the box room for a few days. I never understood why! Eddie was sent to France and he sent me a souvenir hanky from there. His battalion was part of the defence in France to enable the Dunkirk evacuation to take place. He was captured in the basement of a big house with his fellow companions, taken prisoner-of-war and made to walk to Poland where he was sent to several POW camps. For some time after his capture Doris didn't know whether he was alive or dead and was very relieved when she knew that he was still alive, even though a prisoner. She was working in a printing works dealing with government papers so didn’t have to join up. Her first question at lunchtime when she came in was "Is there any mail?", and if there wasn't she would be upset, and if there was she would still sometimes cry. At school we were told that we would all have to help with the war effort. I came home and asked Aunty Polly what I could do and after much thought they found me a job. I had to cut the newspapers up into squares and hang them on a string in the outside toilet. There was no inside toilet or bathroom in the house. Everyone washed daily in the scullery beyond the kitchen where there was a sink and copper and only hot water if you boiled a kettle on the range in the kitchen. On Fridays it was bath and Amami night. Amami was a shampoo very popular then. Aunty Polly had two tin baths hanging outside the back door, a small one and a long one. I had the small one in front of the kitchen range and they had the long one in turns. The only time I didn't have Amami was when it was discovered that I had nits in my hair, (small flea eggs) and I had to have carbolic shampoos and a fine toothed comb used afterwards to get the lice out. There were no fridges then so fats and milk were kept outside in a wooden safe with a wire mesh door under the same roof cover as the tin baths. The milk bottle had a porous cover on it (like a thin flower pot) and it stood in water to keep the milk cool.

Inside in the kitchen Aunty Polly had a large walk in larder which ran under her stairs. On the shelves she kept all her provisions and stores, including vinegar, the smell of which I still associate with her larder. As the war went on a mattress was put on the floor of the larder and when the air raid warning (or siren) started we used to get out of our beds and get under the stairs together until the "all clear" siren went. Sometimes we were there for hours. Adults and children got used to broken nights and going to school or work feeling tired the next day. They had a little dog called Prince, shortened to Prinny, and he knew that when the siren went off he had to go to the door by the stairs and when it was opened he shot in, and as soon as the all clear went he was scratching on the door to come out. One weekend my mother and Nanny had come for a visit and were sleeping in the front bedroom looking out on the road. When the siren went we all followed the usual procedure to go under the stairs except Nanny who said that "Hitler wasn't getting her out of her bed". As we were 30 odd miles out of London she felt we were safe. Unfortunately, the German planes after bombing London used to discharge bombs and land mines as they tried to get away swiftly and this night several fell on Aylesbury, one of them 100yds from the house. This resulted in all the front windows being blown out and Aunty Polly’s new net curtains ending up on the hedge. We were unhurt but deafened and 2 minutes after the blast Nanny rushed in to join us! That weekend when playing outside, another child dropped a paving slab on my hand and it bled profusely. When I returned home covered in blood and sucking the hand, it was Doris who took me to the hospital to have stitches put in. She wheeled me to the hospital on her bike and gave me her 2oz weekly sweet coupons for being brave.

Sometimes when there was a lull in the raids on London I would be sent up to London ‘care of the guard’ to spend a weekend with my mother and Nanny. These often turned out to be not quiet weekends at all and I can remember the search lights in the sky looking for enemy planes during raids and having to take shelter either in the air raid shelters in the streets or on the platforms in the underground where many people spent the night with blankets. When the raids were over and you returned outside the smell of burning was awful and the fires were everywhere and many houses bombed and destroyed. One weekend we stayed in a very fine town house which had been loaned to the Soldier, Sailors and Airmen’s Association (SSAFA) for the war and was off Portland Place. We rented a room there and were able to get meals in the large kitchens downstairs. We could see in the dining room all the best china which had been locked away during the war and upstairs in the nursery they had toys and a big rocking horse.
In the meantime Doris heard that Eddie had been very ill and had a collapsed lung and was being repatriated. He came by ship to Liverpool and was brought off on a stretcher and taken south to a convalescent hospital with TB where he remained until the war ended.
I had been to two schools in Aylesbury but I had to move on then as my mother was remarrying and my future stepfather was in the RAF and we were moving to be near his camp in Spalding, Lincs. From there we moved to Wisbech to live with an RAF family until my mother found a furnished house and I started a new Junior School. My mother arranged for some of my toys and books and dolls house to be sent down from London but in the event they were either lost or stolen as they never arrived. At a local auction she bought me a set of Angela Brazil school stories and I read all of these many times. The teacher at the junior school told my mother that my maths was poor and I was unlikely to pass the scholarship to the High School later on. Soon after this we moved to a different part of Wisbech and I went to another Junior School. Here we learned to knit and were given wool to make socks and balaclavas for the troops.
My mother then had a baby boy and my Nanny came again to live with us as my stepfather was away a lot in the services. To everybody's surprise I passed the scholarship and went to the High School in Wisbech which I really enjoyed. The River Nene divided the girls’ High School from the boys’ Grammar School. We used to meet for concerts and plays and some sports. Our school playing fields were shared with a farmer for grazing his cows. This was because land was at a premium and needed for agriculture or animal grazing. In fact a lot of the parks in London and elsewhere had had areas dug up and planted with vegetables instead of flowers. We played hockey between 1 and 4pm and the rest of the time the cows were in the fields. I can remember one day when playing hockey I skidded on a wet pancake and fell face downwards into another. I opened my mouth to call out and found my teeth coated with dung! When you have had a close encounter with a wet pancake it is an experience that stays in your mind for ever.
To earn some pocket money I took a morning paper round on my way to school in the week and on Saturdays worked in the newsagents downstairs or their little library upstairs. I got the sack from the paper round as I was always late getting up and the papers didn't all get delivered on my way to school and the customers didn't like getting their morning papers on my way home at teatime! This left the shop job, and one of my duties at the end of the day was to go through the printing works at the back of the shop and get a container of water and bring it back to the shop and sprinkle this water on the wood floor so that someone could follow me and sweep the floor without raising too much dust. I must have overfilled the container one day and had a lot of water left when I had finished so opened the shop door and threw it out. Unfortunately it went over a lady customer. I might have got a reprimand from the manager but cooked my goose by laughing when she bent forward and a lot of water fell down from the brim of her hat.
There were a lot of houses in those days that had small walls outside with iron railings on top. These were all removed in the war for melting down for wartime uses. .
One of the camps where my stepfather was stationed was Greenham Common, Newbury. There were a lot of Americans stationed there who loved organising parties for children. We went down there twice to stay. One visit was in the summer when we stayed in a farm cottage in the summer holidays and I ate lots of Worcester apples from a tree in the garden. I had been to the local British Restaurant (which was an austere government sponsored cafe with fixed prices) with my mother and eaten a sandwich spread roll which had been stale and made me sick so I was unable to go to the summer party. Each American had two children to look after at the parties and my GI turned up at the house next day with a huge ham sandwich with white bread and butter. I had to share it with everyone. He also bought me a huge tin of pineapple juice which I insisted on taking to bed the first night and only opened it the next day. At Christmas we all had a wonderful party with presents for all the kids. The Yanks would say "Hi kids" and we would say "Got any gum, chum?" The sweets they gave us were called "O Henry" and were nutty/toffee bars and "lifesavers" which were like fruit polos. They also gave us rides in their jeeps. We appreciated the sweets as the ration was 2oz per week when there were any available. Every Saturday that we knew the shops had sweets we queued for our ration. If it was a Mars bar I used to slice it into 7 thin pieces and try and ration myself to one a day. To this day I feel greedy eating a Mars bar straight off.

Wisbech was an agricultural area and had lots of fruit and vegetables growing around the town. Although meat, fats and dried foods, tea and coffee were rationed we were never short of fruit and vegetables, a lot of which went to Smedleys the canning factory in the town. We had extra holidays to go fruit picking and it was lovely picking strawberries and raspberries but not so nice picking gooseberries, apart from getting pricked they were usually grown under the fruit trees and we were bitten by mosquitos. Later on in the year it was apples, plums and then potatoes. Once a shipment of bananas arrived in the town and each family was given one. It was decided that my brother could have it as he had never tasted a banana. He took a big bite, chewed it up and spat the lot out to everyone's disgust. I remember grabbing the rest and eating it myself.
Once a year the Sunday School had an outing to the seaside and we used to go to Hunstanton, stopping on the way to get out of the coach at Sandringham to peer through the wrought iron gates to catch a glimpse of the Kings's private house. We used to look forward to this outing, but were never allowed down on the beach which was heavily mined and covered in long rows of rolled barbed wire. Instead we ran up and down the promenade and sat on the grassy slopes to eat our sandwiches and fruit and pop and then returned after a great day out.
My stepfather brought home a piece of parachute silk and my mother had it made into petticoats and blouses for us. Unfortunately on windy days the blouses blew out back and front as it was light weight fabric and very soft.
By now I had joined the guides and we had a trip to a forest for the weekend. One of our meals was sausages and as fat was in short supply, the Guider cooked them in liquid paraffin, which was a disaster as everybody then had diarrohea. I was one of the unlucky ones who was in charge of the latrines which was basically just digging a big hole and then covering it up with
earth later. We slept in bell tents on a ground sheet with blankets and it wasn't particularly comfortable and put me off camping for ever.
In Wisbech we had a few stray bombs fall. One night the local cinema was completely flattened. The next morning all the kids were climbing over the site looking for shrapnel as souvenirs.
In later life when I met John (my husband) and told him about my wartime days he said that in the Nottinghamshire village where he lived (Tuxford) he had experienced the reverse of what I had had. He had been there when the evacuees came to stay during the war and they had had to share their school with them, the locals going to school in the morning and the evacuees going in the afternoon and they shared a desk. They had a lot of airfields nearby and he and his friends also used to search for souvenirs and one day he came home with a boot that still had a foot in it! Soldiers and Land Army girls were billeted around the village. John got a job in the butchers shop, and one of the things he had to do was hold the frozen legs of lamb apart while the butcher put a cleaver down the middle. Another job he had was at the local parish church (unpaid) to pump the organ during services, but he switched to the Methodist when they paid a pound per year. His Aunt Edna had a licence to keep a pig and when it was slaughtered the family shared the pork pies, brawn and haslet that resulted.
There were a lot of airfields near Wisbech and on 6 June 1944 we had thousands of planes come over during school time and were sent out in the playground to see them. We asked the teacher where they were going and she said they were going over for the D-Day landings in France and that.this would hasten the end of the war .

In 1945 the V1 rocket planes started to come over. They were reasonably slow with a tail flame at the back. When the flame extinguished you knew it was going to explode. If we were out in the playground and one came over the teachers made us lay flat on the ground and fortunately our school was never hit. Later the V2s were another threat but they came out of the sky and hit places and no-one knew of their existence until they struck.
Most of the teachers we had at my schools were either brought out of retirement or had some physical defect whereby they were unable to go into the forces. Towards the end of the war we had a young teacher with a club foot. One day at home my Nanny hid the papers as they had explicit pictures of the Belsen Camps which had been liberated by the Russian and British troops. However, when we arrived at school our teacher had put all these pictures round the classroom wall and we had to all go round and look. Some of the children were crying at the atrocities committed, and the sight of the skeletal bodies. She was undeterred however, and said that we should remember this all our lives as something one human being had done to another and never to do such things ourselves.
By this time we had moved to another house in Wisbech and in May 1945 the war in Europe came to an end and the road organised a big street party for the children with trestle tables the length of the street and lots of food, followed by races with prizes. When the war with Japan ended in August 1945 we moved back to London.
George VI said there was going to be a Victory Parade through the streets of London so my mother took me up late one evening and we slept all night on the pavement in Oxford Street, near Marble Arch, to see the parade go by the following morning. I remember the bands playing and the King and Queen and princesses waving. I was 13 then. Then we went home to sleep for a few hours and came back in the evening when the crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square and all the lights came on and the fountains were lit in red, white and blue. People kept jumping in the fountains. The crowds got so big that we got pushed into a cul-de-sac called Craigs Court by the police and had to stay there until 3am and then walk the 10 miles back to Harlesden because we had missed the last bus. (Years later in 1977 I went with my son Philip and spent all night on the pavement to see Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee procession go by and we waited near the Law Courts in the Strand. John and my son Andrew went up to London early next morning and stood in the Mall to see the Queen and Prince Philip come out on the balcony).
By the time my schooling was finished I had been to 9 schools and lived in 15 houses and 8 counties. Not really a desirable way to grow up but unavoidable at the time.

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