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I was born in October 1926 in Cricklewood N W London and grew up there. My parents were Hubert and Evalyn Short. I have an older sister, Lucy. My first school was Miss McIntosh’s School in Oxgate Gardens Cricklewood. At the age of eight, I went to Westbourne School in Paddington. I then went to St Marylebone Grammar School and was evacuated to Redruth in Cornwall at the beginning of the war. I left there in early 1941 and went to St Paul’s School at Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire. The school had been evacuated from Swiss Cottage Hampstead. I left school in January 1943 and was employed in an office in the City of London. I was ‘called up’ in December 1944 and was sent to work in the coalmines as a Bevin Boy in the South Yorkshire coalfields and was there at the end of the war in August 1945. I was discharged from the mines in November 1945, as being unfit. I then was conscripted into the army in the Royal Signals and served in Italy and Germany, until I was demobbed in March 1948.