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My parents house at Halstead in Kent was bombed in May 1940, three months before I was born. It received a direct hit from a stray bomb dropped by the Germans on their way back from bombing Biggin Hill aerodrome. Although it was in the country looters soon arrived to see what they could get, but they were unlucky as not a lot was left.

My father was in the Army and my mother was homeless. She spent the war years staying with friends and relatives and in digs. It was only when I had my own children that I realised how difficult it must have been for her with a small baby/toddler to cope with. My first Christmas was in Leeds with a friend and her baby, my mother鈥檚 main memory of that time was of damp nappies everywhere. We also went to Shropshire where my mother was bitten by the resident Alsatian dog, not a good place for a baby, so we moved from there. We spent five months in Barmouth in North Wales where there was little evidence of the war; at one place there we were asked to move as my early morning singing of nursery rhymes woke the other residents (I was three at the time).

On and off we stayed with my grandfather, but there were problems there. At the end of the war we were staying with him at New Milton and I can remember being given a Union Jack to wave at school but of course I didn鈥檛 know why. I kept that flag for a long time afterwards.

Our house was finally rebuilt in 1947 at which time my mother and I were in a flat over a chemist鈥檚 shop at Leigh on Sea, experiencing a very cold winter, and my father was living with his mother and working in London. When we were finally reunited as a family my father was a stranger to me. Whether it was because of this early separation or because he was a reserved man I don鈥檛 know, but I felt I only really started to get to know him when he was in eighties. Still at least I had a father, if he hadn鈥檛 broken his leg playing football he might very well have been killed along with the majority of his comrades in an action his unit were involved in. Such is the randomness of life.

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