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I was born in Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital (the original Victorian house) in Hammersmith, West London in 1935. My family moved to East Acton in 1937, as my father enlisted in the army - the REME, because of little work during the Depression. The Army Married Allowance was small but regular. My parents finally moved away to Devon in 1971.

So all my war memories are firmly rooted in East Acton, and it was surprising how much came back to me when I visited there preparatory to writing A Sheltered Childhood as a Family History project. Although there have been major visual changes — very few hedges survive, for instance — it’s still very familiar and nostalgic, possibly an ‘age’ thing!

Revisiting the past has made me realise what, I am ashamed to admit, I have only slowly come to appreciate fairly recently: the truly extraordinary resilience of mothers in that intense time. They struggled to feed children with rationing, shortages, and little money. They went without sleep night after night and somehow kept homes, children, and clothes, clean, despite soap shortages and often without hot water. Above all, they tried to preserve a kind of normality for their kids, in a world gone barking mad.

My contributions are a belated ‘thank you’ to my mother and to my father, who spent his war in bleak and remote places with little comforts or recognition. They are my memories of my family’s war experiences. Written as I remember them - as a child - this may not be exactly the way things were, but it’s close.