Because of the air raids, my mother used to tell me, it wasn’t safe for babies to be born in London during the War and so she had to go to Chelmsford, where there was less danger from the bombs, to have me. Later on, when I asked her if I was a Londoner like my cousins Maureen, Christine and Billy, she said no, you had to be born in London to be able to call yourself a Londoner. I had been born in Chelmsford which meant that I was an Essex girl.
When she brought me home from the hospital I was no bigger than a doll. Evidently, I had inherited from her the rare brittle bone condition which had affected members of her family for several generations. Sure enough, I had my first fracture - a broken arm - while I was still a baby. To the astonishment of the medical staff who treated me, I managed to pick off every bit of the plaster. It was unprecedented, they told my mother, for such a young child to do such a thing. I think it was the first manifestation of the powerful creative urge which was to become the most important thing in my life; by the time I was two years old I had already begun to draw prolifically.
Like many of those children who had been born in the Second World War, it was some time before my father, who was serving in the Royal Navy, set eyes on me. I was such a fragile, little thing that I must have been a big disappointment to him. Taking into account these factors, it is hardly surprising that there was no real attachment between us and he played very little part in my early upbringing, apart from occasionally being told by my mother to button my liberty bodice or do up my shoelaces. Like many other little girls, I was obliged to wear the hated liberty bodice; it was a tightly fitted, seamed garment fastened at the front by lots of minute buttons and my father’s clumsy fingers had great difficulty fitting them into the equally tiny buttonholes.
Once, during one of my parents’ frequent rows, I heard my mother say ‘You never did like her, did you?’ and I knew they were talking about me. Somehow, I never minded because I thought it was normal for a father not to have much of a role, other than that of provider, in the bringing up of a daughter and I used to feel embarrassed if I witnessed any display of affection between any other girl and her father.
After the War, when he was demobbed in 1946, my father resumed his job as manager of the export department in the family-owned leather goods factory near Theydon, in Essex, where we lived in a pleasant, rural location. Our address was 303, Morgan Crescent and our house had all the features of the typical, inter-war semi. For example, there was a deep front porch with a stained glass motif and large, bowed front windows; the woodwork was elaborate and there was a lot of decorative brickwork. There was a time when these houses were considered rather naff but nowadays they are recognised as having a place in the history of architecture.
My father was a clever, creative man and he had lots of hobbies which, now that the dark clouds of war had rolled away, he was able to take up again, to the displeasure of my mother who considered them a waste of time; I, however, found all these activities very interesting and they were the only occasions on which I took any real notice of my father. He was a passionate gardener and he had inherited from his father green fingers; even as a very young child, I was able to appreciate that we had the most beautiful garden in the area and it was from watching him and being amongst the flowers, studying the faces of the pansies and violas, squeezing the dragons’ mouths of the antirrhinums, enjoying the peppery scent of the lupins, the delicate fragrance of sweet-peas which, even today, evokes happy memories, that I, too, developed a lifelong love of flowers. The centrepiece of our garden was a series of ponds, each on a different level, connected by waterfalls which were operated by a pumping apparatus which forced water from the lowest level back into the top pool. My father had designed and made it himself and I spent many hours, totally absorbed, watching the fascinating process of the digging out of the soil, the mixing of the cement, and the laying of the surrounding crazy paving. To a child, a simple thing like mixing cement by hand is utterly mesmerizing: the sound of the cutting motion of the spade as it carefully combines the sand with the cement; the making of the well in the centre into which the water is poured, gradually, being careful not to add too much; and the final result: the lovely, sloppy mixture into which it is so difficult to resist putting small fingers.
At last, after the ponds had been lined with cement and allowed to dry, it was time to fill them with water. There are no words to describe the thrill I experienced as the hose was turned on. I crouched on the concrete slab which spanned one of the little waterfalls and watched, spellbound, as the water began to gush; at last, the pump was switched on and with much gurgling, the water flowed merrily. Bliss! Another of my father’s hobbies was making and flying model aircraft. In a room upstairs he stored all the interesting and mysterious things needed to make them: lengths of balsa wood, tissue paper, glue, paint; but the room was out of bounds to me because, also stored there, were sticks of explosives which, used with thick rubber bands, propelled the planes into the air. Sometimes, at weekends, my mother and I used to go with him to an open hillside where there were other model aircraft enthusiasts and I would enjoy watching the little planes gliding overhead, like dragonflies.
One day, my father took my mother and me to an airfield where there were real planes. He asked me if I would like to go for a ride in one of them and, thinking he was joking, I shook my head and laughed. But it was not a joke: he had actually booked a flight! I pleaded with my mother not to let him make me go with him but she told me not to be so silly: I would enjoy it, she said. I looked up and saw a couple of planes buzzing overhead and the very idea of being airborne terrified me. When I saw the machine in which my father intended to fly, my terror turned to panic: it was a tiger moth and to me it looked no more substantial than the flimsy models he made out of balsa wood and tissue paper. Ignoring my screams, he picked me up and carried me into the plane. The pilot tried in vain to placate me but by now I was beside myself. Struggling with all my might as my father held me down onto his lap, we trundled along the runway, bumping and shaking; as we left the ground my stomach gave a great lurch and my screams became hysterical. The flight could have lasted only a few minutes but to me it seemed an eternity; when, to my immeasurable relief, we touched down and the plane came to a halt, I had screamed myself hoarse. I never forgave my father for the ordeal to which he had subjected me and I had nightmares about flying for years afterwards. As for him, when he arranged the flight he must have hoped that I would share his enjoyment of such an exciting adventure: probably, if I had been born a boy, I would have been more enthusiastic. As ever, I was a disappointment to him.
When I was still very young, my mother enrolled me in a ballet class. I don’t know whether it was because the doctors had told her ballet lessons would be good for my bones or whether it was because nice girls from good famillies always went to ballet class: knowing my mother, the latter probably applied. Anyway, once a week I joined a lot of other little girls and we skipped and pranced about under the direction of a harrassed, elderly female. After some weeks, our teacher told us we were going to give a performance on a real stage; I received this information with indifference but my mother was excited. For the great event we were to have dresses specially made up, all in different colours. The fabric was a stiff organdie, flocked with little white flowers; mine was a pale blue and I liked the way the skirt, gathered at the waist with a frilled petticoat underneath, stuck right out.
On the afternoon of the performance my mother dressed me in my blue frock, tied a blue ribbon in my hair, dabbed on a little lipstick and rubbed some more into my cheeks to make them pink. Rustling in our stiff organdie dresses, giggling nervously, we arranged ourselves in a circle on the stage, arms aloft, toes pointed, ready to begin our dance, and the curtains parted. When I saw all those people staring up at us, I froze: while all the other little girls skipped around me, dutifully performing our rehearsed routine,I remained immobile, paralysed with shyness. The audience tittered and the teacher grabbed me and pulled me off the stage. ‘Never mind’, she told my mother afterwards, we’ve got the second performance to come and she’ll have got over her stage fright by then.
Sure enough, by the time we were to give our second performance, I felt positively blasé, having been bribed with sweeties, cajoled, and finally convinced that there was really nothing to be nervous about and none of the other little girls had been to shy to dance, had they. So, when the curtains parted and the audience looked up, I began to skip along with the rest, full of new-found confidence. But we were only a few seconds into our routine when I suddenly became aware of a discomfort: there was a blockage in my nose which needed urgent attention. So, in mid-skip, I came to a halt and began an investigation of the offending nostril. With my finger up my nose, I gazed down at the audience, indifferent to their titters. Once again, the teacher rushed onto the stage and whisked me off.
Undaunted, my mother continued to take me to ballet classes. By this time, I was growing bored and my attention began to wander. There was one girl in particular who interested me
greatly because she had the most extraordinary bottom I had ever seen: it stuck right out, like a Victorian bustle, a shelf of a bottom, which you could surely put things on. I was convinced that such a bottom couldn’t possibly be real. One day, while we were skipping around in a circle, as usual, I found myself directly behind this girl. Overcome with curiosity, I was unable to control myself; I bent down, out of sight of the teacher, and sank my teeth into the quivering flesh. There was a deafening screech, followed by equally deafening howls and the circle came to a halt, the little girls almost falling over one another in their surprise. The girl’s mother was outraged. ‘Look!’ she said to my mother, lifting up her daughter’s skirt and pulling down her knickers, ‘Toothmarks!’ I regarded the result of my impulsive action with satisfaction; there was no doubt about it: the firm, fat, fleshy, white bottom, the indentations of my teeth clearly visible, was real.
During those early years, I had - apart from drawing - one very great passion: trains. In those days, the railway network was extensive and everyone travelled by train. Every Saturday, I accompanied my mother to London, where she went to visit my grandmother, and it was in this way that I became interested in locomotives. To me, it seemed impossible that there could be in the world anything more exciting than those great London termini; even the names had a magical quality: King’s Cross, Paddington, Waterloo....... How I loved to watch the huge engines gliding into the station! I thrilled to the hiss of the escaping steam, the clanking of metal upon metal, the sulphurous smell of water on burning coal. I was in awe of their massive bulk yet at the same time enthralled. Travelling, I could never sit still and would press my face to the window so that I might get a glimpse of the engine whenever it rounded a bend; besides, the scratchy, plush seats rubbed against the backs of my bare legs and there was nothing to look at if you sat down apart from the panoramic, monochrome photographs of railway destinations which adorned each compartment.
One day, on one of these customary trips to London,we were getting out of our compartment when my mother dropped one of her gloves on to the track between the platform and the carriage. She was inordinately proud of those gloves; they were of black leather and, she was in the habit of telling me, you could always tell a real lady by the quality of the gloves she wore: obviously, she considered hers to be terribly smart. At once, she began to panic and frantically looked around for help. I had a reverential respect for any official connected with the railway and I was aghast when, seeing one in the distance, she waved her arm and called him over. Other passengers were looking at us with curiousity and I curled up with embarrassment as she explained her predicament. The man went off and a few minutes later another man appeared carrying a long pole with a prong on the end of it. Nimbly, he lowered himself onto the track, fished about underneath the carriage and emerged at last with my mother’s glove dangling on the end of the prong. I watched the process with wide-eyed wonderment; to think that anyone could be brave enough to go underneath a train just like that! Supposing it began to move? But the man was smiling as he handed the glove back to my mother. ‘I won’t say thank-you,’ she said, ‘because it’s bad luck to thank a person for handing back a dropped glove.’ The man laughed. ‘She’ll break someone’s heart one day,’ he said, beaming at me, ‘with them eyes!’
Although I never had any great fondness for my grandmother, I looked forward to our weekly visits because she lived in the same house as my cousins Maureen, Christine and Billy and even though they were older than I was, I enjoyed their company and we all got on very well together. The house belonged to my mother’s brother, Bill, and his wife, Marie. When my grandfather was killed in the Great War, my grandmother was left homeless: her husband’s family had never liked her and I think it was because they had done rather well for themselves and they considered their son to be too good for her. My mother and my grandmother were always falling out and having rows so that was probably why she hadn’t come to live with us.
I loved my Auntie Marie. She was warm-hearted and generous and I always looked to her for comfort rather than to my mother. She had an irrepressible sense of humour and could make anyone laugh. My uncle Bill, on the other hand, even though I liked him, was very quiet. ‘It’s a wonder we ever got married,’ Auntie Marie used to say. ‘When we were courting, he’d invite me round to his house for tea and I’d have to sit there twiddling my thumbs and staring at the wall while he, your mum and their mum finished reading their books.’
Auntie Marie had a wonderful talent for recounting events. Often, I’d say to her ‘Tell me about
the War, Auntie!’ and I would sit, spellbound, as she related her experiences. The one which impressed and moved me most was her description of a train leaving the station, full of men going off to fight. ‘The men were all hanging out of the windows,’ she said ‘ and the wives, the mums and the girlfriends were still clinging on to them even as the train was gathering speed. They never knew, of course, if they’d ever see them again.’
Athough it had only begun to recover from the devastating effects of the Blitz, London was still a thrilling place to be in as far as I was concerned. I loved the big shops, especially those which had funicular systems for handling money. When a purchase was made, the assistant would put the cash into a globe which was then sent by means of an overhead system of cables to the cashier sitting in a kiosk. The cashier would unscrew the globe, remove the money then send back a receipt together with the change. I would stand, mesmerized, my neck aching, watching all the globes whizzing to and fro. But my soul knew no greater bliss than to visit Gamages ( to my ears the very name, like those London stations, sounded magical) to look at the toys. It was here that they displayed the most wonderful model railway layouts and train sets and no amount of threats or bribes could drag me away from this empyrean.
After we’d been to the shops, my mother would take me to Lyon’s for lunch. I liked the warm, steamy atmosphere, the clink of china and cutlery and the comforting smells. Generally, my lunch consisted of a bread roll and a bowl of rather unpleasant, watery, tomato soup. Sometimes, if my mother was in a good mood, I was allowed an ice-cream; it was served in a tall glass with a long-handled spoon and I had to stand up in order to scoop it out .
After lunch, we caught the trolley bus to Leytonstone, where my grandmother lived. Sometimes, floating in the sky above our heads, like trunkless, tethered elephants, were dirigible balloons; the sinister, black shapes frightened me, yet at the same time fascinated me, and although I kept my gaze deliberately fixed to the pavement, I couldn’t resist glancing up at them every now and again. I was rather afraid, too, of the trolley buses; when they were in motion, the long, metal rods which made contact with the overhead cables sparked and flashed alarmingly. We disembarked by a pub called ‘The Baker’s Arms’ and crossed the road and we had to pass a church outside which, every Saturday, when there were continuous weddings, groups of women gathered to see the succession of brides emerging. My mothered also lingered to watch and while the other women commented favourably on a bride’s appearance, she would invariably make some scathing remark.
Peterborough Road, our destination, is a very long road indeed and we had to walk almost to the end of it. After a while, I would begin to drag my feet and grizzle; the walk seemed interminable but I was generally distracted by the sight of the colourful, hand-made rag-rugs which housewives used to hang on their front walls- ostensibly to air but in reality to show them off. During the War, when not a scrap of fabric was wasted, women used to tear rags into strips and, using sacking or similar fabric as backing, they would pull the strips of material through holes in the base fabric and tie them, thus creating a tufted effect. The Board of Trade published a booklet in the War called ‘Make Do and Mend’ advising women on how to make clothes last longer and how to renovate old ones. Even knitted garments were unravelled and made up into new ones.There was even advice on how to look after corsets. It began: ‘Now that rubber is so scarce your corset is one of your most precious possessions.’ How I laughed when, years later, I discovered my mother’s copy of the booklet and read that paragraph!
The house next door to the one in which my grandmother, uncle, aunt and cousins lived was one of the very first to be hit by a dreaded, flying V2 bomb. On the day it happened, Auntie Marie had been to the hairdresser’s to get the latest ‘bubble-cut’. Back home, she wound her hair up with pipe-cleaners and rags and set about cleaning the grate. Then the bomb landed. My cousins, Maureen and Christine, (Billy hadn’t yet been born) were still babies, and shared a big pram which was parked in the garden at the time. Prams were heavy, solid, built-to-last contraptions in trhose times and even though the force of the explosion propelled it to the end of the garden it remained upright and undamaged so that the children were unharmed. Poor Auntie Marie, covered in soot and blood, was carried out on a stretcher, looking a sight worse than she actually was. Even then, her sense of humour never failed her and she chuckled when she heard an onlooker say, aghast, ‘Just look at that poor woman!’
At the back of my cousins’ house was a long, narrow garden beyond which was an expanse of bomb-damaged land which at one time must have been a rather splendid garden, full of fruit trees. Now that it was neglected and overgrown, it provided us with an exciting place to
play so we used to trespass there regularly and in autumn we’d steal the fruit. Beyond this, in the distance, was Whipp’s Cross Hospital, a big, imposing, red-bricked building.
Peterborough Road is very close to the edge of Epping Forest and common grazing rights meant that cattle would sometimes come wandering past the houses.The East End of London had been badly bombed and many people had been left homeless. I often used to wonder about the curious, corrugated metal buildings which were a common sight in that area, always in neat rows; they were tubular in shape and had doors and windows but I could not imagine that people actually lived in them. It was some time before I learned that they were, of course, temporary homes for people who had lost their houses in the War.
In my cousin’s’ house, an upstairs bedroom had been converted into a bedsit for my grandmother and it was there that we had our tea on Saturday afternoons. The meal consisted of tinned meat - I think it was Spam - and a salad of tomatoes and cucumber, drowned in vinegar. Later, as a greater variety of food became available, we would have corned beef, cold tongue or even tinned salmon. Afterwards, there would be tinned fruit and Libby’s evaporated milk. Sometimes, my Auntie Marie would buy winkles and I’d watch in horror as they picked the winkles out of their shells with pins, dipped them in vinegar and ate them. To me, it seemed as disgusting as eating snails.
My grandmother suffered from arthritic fingers and to keep them mobile, she knitted. But the only things she ever made were gloves - dozens and dozens of them. They were always the same: plain colours with contrasting, tuck-stitch patterns on the knuckle of each finger. Every member of the family owned several pairs of my grandmother’s hand-knitted gloves yet still she carried on knitting. She, too, suffered from the brittle bone condition which affected my mother and me and she had a brother, Uncle Albert, who had broken so many bones in his life that they’d told him at the hospital he must have had more fractures than anyone else in England.
When I was very young, I was confused by the great number of female relations - all elderly - we seemed to have. They always had old-fashioned names like Flo, Cissy or Connie and lived in gloomy houses full of funny ornaments and china and old photographs. I was obliged to accompany my mother when she visited them and though I was under orders to be on my best behaviour I would soon start to fidget and then I’d be sent out into the garden to play. But the gardens were boring, full of dreary, flowerless shrubs and there was no scope for imagination. I liked gardens with trees and lawns and secret places where I could pretend there were winding tracks along which I could ride in an imaginary miniature train. The main topic of conversation during these hated visits was, invariably, the War. As I grew older I came to realise that although many people had endured long years of terrible suffering, for others it had been the most exciting time of their lives. This was certainly the case as far as my mother was concerned; in 1943 she enrolled in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and, according to her Certificate of Service, did very well. She was probably sorry that she had to be discharged a few months later because she was pregnant with me.
My family would not infrequently talk about a certain Uncle George who had been among the very first of the British soldiers who liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Later that day he sent a letter home. It began ‘If you saw what I have seen today........’ Letters were censored, of course, so he was unable to go into detail. All he was permitted to say was that although England had endured terrible losses and great hardship because of the War, it was nothing compared to the unimaginable suffering of the inmates of Belsen. I was too young to understand what these conversations were about but whenever I refused to eat my food or became finicky I would be told it was wicked to waste food when others had starved to death in concentration camps.
My father had two brothers. Strangely, all three called each other by their second names; my father, whose first name was Basil, had always been called Roy; Richard was called Albie and Hugh had been known by that name for so long that nobody could even remember his first name. My mother was jealous of Hugh’s wife, Claire, and said she was a snooty cow. They lived in a nice house in Harlow, in Essex, and my mother was resentful because he’d done well for himself and my father hadn’t.
‘You’re useless!’ she used to complain. ‘If you had more go in you you’d have been a success, like your brother!’
Once, when we were on our way to Harlow to visit Hugh, my parents had such a dreadful row that my father turned the car around and drove straight back home. He accused my mother of having ‘carried on’ with his brother during the War while he was serving in the Navy and
suggested that I was Hugh’s child and not his. I shrank into my seat in the back of the car, frightened and bewildered. I did not understand these adult matters and as always the ferocity of their frequent slanging matches, which could last for hours, upset and worried me.
Albie’s wife, Lal, was also exasperated by what she referred to as the ‘curse of the Walkers’. ‘They’re all the same,’ she would complain. ‘Dreamers. They never get on.’’
According to her, the last words of one of their antecedents had been ‘ I’ve been a fool!’
‘That just about sums them up,’ she said. ‘The whole lot of them.’
My uncle and aunt lived in Brixham, in Devon, and sometimes we would go by train to visit them and stay for a few days. They had two children: a boy, Tony, who was several years my senior and a girl, Stephanie, who was exactly the same age as I was. To be precise, I was the elder by one day. Uncle Hugh was a photographer and he had a shop, with living quarters above, near the harbour. It was a large, rambling building with lots of stairs and the smell of photographic chemicals permeated every part. The living room overlooked the street below and opposite there was a shop on which was displayed a figurehead from an old ship. She had a large, barely concealed bosom, big blue eyes, outlined in black, and very red lips; her dress was bright blue and she fascinated me so much that I could not take my eyes off her.
I was captivated, too,by the hundreds of gulls which continually wheeled and squawked overhead. Their cries and the pattering of their feet on the roof were the first thing you heard every morning. After breakfast, Uncle Albie used to open the window and put breadcrusts on the sill; they’d come swooping down, squabbling loudly, and seize the bread. There was one bird which would hop right into the room and take food from my uncle’s hand. Nothing would induce me to do the same because I was afraid of its vicious, snatching beak.
Brixham Harbour was a place of sheer enchantment with its wonderfully exciting medley of colour, noise and bustle. I loved all the strange smells, too - the tarry ropes, the fish, the deisel oil and the sea itself. When the fishing boats were in, there was a forest of wooden masts and drying sails; their catches were unloaded into containers which ran on metal tracks and I was convinced that somewhere there must be a little engine to pull them along and was bitterly disappointed not to see it. The fish was auctioned in a big building at the entrance to the harbour and it was thrilling to witness the bidding and the unintelligible shouting of the auctioneer.
Behind my uncle’s house was a long flight of stone steps at the top of which were some cottages and it was in one of these that my grandfather came to live after the death of his wife. I was fond of my grandfather but, strangely, I remember absolutely nothing about my grandmother other than the fact that she suffered from car sickness. Every journey would require several stops; she’d fall out of the car, retch noisily, then climb back in, all smiles. ‘I feel like a new woman now!’ she’d say, every time. To me, who never suffered from travel sickness, it was all rather strange and interesting.
She died while I was very young but my grandfather lived on into his eighties. He was a kind, good-natured man and he took it upon himself to teach me the names of all the wild flowers we came across so that even before I started school I was familiar with plant names such as bird’s-foot trefoil, kidney vetch and fumitory. He also loved birds and I think it was his interest in them that sparked the same enthusiasm in me. At one time, he told me, he had tamed a jackdaw which used to fly to him when he whistled to it and would sit on his shoulder. I didn’t believe him until I saw a photograph. In fact, the same photograph is in the family album today and, although I didn’t appreciate it then, it is a very beautiful picture, full of mood and atmosphere. It depicts my grandfather and one of his sons, their backs turned to the camera, absorbed with the lighting of a bonfire; sure enough, sitting on his shoulder is the jackdaw.
Although I never had much to do with my older cousin, Tony, I always loved the company of my other cousin, Stephanie. Apart from being the same age as each other, we had lots of things in common and we would play happily together for hours. We both loved the beach and we’d spend blissful times among the rock pools, our baggy knickers drooping with wet sand and sea water.
During these vacations, our two families, joined by some relations of Auntie Lal, would make excursions into the Devon countryside. We crowded into two cars which we’d have to vacate every time it was necessary to negotiate one of the very steep hills which are typical of that county. I always fell asleep in the car so I must have missed a good deal; I liked it when we got out and walked around, though. Dartmoor delighted and terrified me. I listened, round-eyed with awe, as they told me about the treacherous boggy places which, if you walked on them, would trap you and suck you under the ground. Tony scared me with stories of ghosts
and monsters and giant, black dogs which came out at night to chase people across the moor and rip their throats out.
Because it was impossible for my mother not to fall out and have a row with somebody, our holidays were inevitably cut short and our journeys home would be ruined by the unpleasant atmosphere she had created. Whatever the argument - even if she was blatantly in the wrong - my mother always had the upper hand. Her command of the English language and the extent of her vocabulary were such that she could render any opponent speechless. People soon learned that to attempt to reason with her was futile. She had, too, a way of putting the blame on someone else even when she knew perfectly well that she was at fault and her phraseology was so skillfully executed, so quick and razor-sharp, that a poor victim would end up believing that they had, after all, been the one to blame.
I learned, at a very early age, to fear my mother. I learned how to discern her moods, how to avoid incurring her wrath, how to go out of my way to avoid trouble. Years later, when as an adult I tried to explain to people what it was about my mother that could make even the strongest spirit quail, I found myself unable to do so. In the end, it was Auntie Marie, in her simple and honest way, who provided the definitive description of my mother’s extraordinary personality. She and I had been reminiscing about the past and I confessed to her that I had always been afraid of my mother. She recounted to me then how, on the day war was declared, after she and everyone else had listened in silence to the wireless and the grave voice of Chamberlain telling them that Germany had not withdrawn its troops from Poland ‘.....and that consequently this country is at war with Germany’ she had imagined that the bombs were going to start raining with immediate effect. With those famous words stlill echoing in her head she decided to take herself and the babies out of London and spend the duration of the war in the country, where it would be safer, with my mother. So she pushed the big pram to the shops at the end of the road, filled it with groceries, hurriedly packed some suitcases and caught the bus.
‘Well, ‘ she said, ‘I stuck it out for three days. After that, I realised I couldn’t stand it any more. I decided I’d rather put up with Hitler and his bombs than your mother.’
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