大象传媒

I don't want to write much about myself. I am a retired international civil servant, now living in Italy, not far south of Anzio in fact, the scene of the Allied landings in 1943. My early childhood was spent in Southeast England as my sister, who is three years older than me, and I were not evacuated. Really I want to record, through my memories from the age of 4 to 9 years, the fortitude of my family who, through their care and affection plus a little bit of luck perhaps, kept my sister and I safe and sound. They were my stepgrandfather, Pat, a Royal Marine who had fought in WW1 and had reenlisted; my half-Irish, generous-to a fault grandmother who had a heart big enough to accommodate a whole regiment of Royal Marines. We called her Mor because at meal times she always used to say "Have some more". She lived until 1981 when she was 93. And there was my mother, Moira, vivacious and pretty, who had married at a ridiculously young age who witnessed the breakup of her marriage, the only war casualty of the immediate family. Never once during the long years of the war did they convey, to me at least, the possibility that the war could be lost. Occasionally there were some long faces of course, but generally it was a matter of patience and right, and we were in the right, would eventually prevail. And it did.