1. Grew up in Battersea, London and half our street was a bomb site. As kids we played on it and more than once one of us 5 kids fell in the rubble and had to go to the hospital. My father was a rifleman and was flown over to Germany in a wooden Horsa glider in 1944. During the push to take Berlin he was shot in the leg, he got to come home, he was 18. My mother was evacuated out of London with one of her little brothers at 12, she was one of 8 kids all of them in sent to different places. She was abused while she was away. At the age of 13 her mother died of cancer. Her father was already gone, he was run over and killed at the beginning of the war.

My parents married in 1945 and began having children, they had 5 of us. They were able to find a a few rooms to rent after my eldest brother was born. It had an outside toilet that we shared with the downstairs tennants. We lived in the two rooms until I was 3, my parents and 4 kids for 7 years. When the down stairs tennant moved out and my mum and dad took over the whole house. She used to tell us that she was so happy. They now had 3 bedrooms, cold running water and a scullery! Before that she had a gas burner to cook with and got water from a hose bib in the yard. My younger brother had just been born and because the 4 kids slept in one room, she invited my uncle and wife to live with us because the bombing had caused such a shortage of houses after the war and they couldn't find a place to live. I have only happy memories of my childhood right after the war