大象传媒

I was born in March 1941, in the workhouse in Eye, Suffolk, where my mother was an evacuee. The workhouse, I hasten to explain, was being used as a wartime hospital. (It doesn't explain this on my birth certificate, however.) My father was in the Army. When my mother became very homesick and depressed, it seemed best to let her return to her family in London - mother, sister, brother.

We were bombed out three times, the worst being the raid on Clapham which I describe. I have the usual boring tales of no bananas, chocolate biscuits, oranges etc. but do remember the food parcels from the USA, and my mother's disgust when, in 1946, I brought home from school a tin of jelly crystals. We did better from our relatives in Ireland who sent us butter and cheese on occasion. I remember the hushed, shocked tones in which news of deaths was discussed, after air raids or when a sericeman failed to come home. In 1944, it was my handsome, fun-loving Uncle Jack who did not come home from Italy, and was mourned for the rest of their lives by my grandmother and mother. My father's brother Ted was a great friend of Jack's, and they shared a best shirt to wear on leave. 'I'm sitting here in his shirt,' said Ted, when he heard.

For months after the war, my sister and I ran to hide in the shelter whenever we heard a plane.

We moved to Liskeard, Cornwall in 1949, and to hear the talk there of Cornish clotted cream and distant fires over Plymouth, it was as if there hadn't been a war there at all. I couldn't believe it.

But, life has treated me well - a happy marriage, daughter, son, grandson, and a long, rewarding and - dare I say it - successful career in education, first in schools, then in Higher Education. I owe my opportunities in life, and my good health, to the wise legislation planned in the thick of the war, and enacted immediately afterwards. Please, Tony Blair, don't wreck it now.