About the contributor

I was born in Octber 1941. My parents had, like so many others, decided that they would marry [November 1940] as life was souncertain. My father had gone to Dunkirk on a boat named "Chantecler" and helped rescue some of the BEF,and I think that decided them. It was not an easy decision for my mother; she was a school teacher, and in those days if you married you stopped work, which meant losing her wage. This was of great importance to her family - her sister was suffering from Lupus Erythamtosus and Mum's wage was providing some necessary comforts. Mum claims that her mother and father didn't speak to her for a year - not, until I was born, infact; but I know this is untrue as her diary shows she visited them a few months before I was born, when they had been bombed. [My maternal grandparents lived in West Ham; Grandad was a docker].

Sadly, her sister's death six months after my birth was a deep blow, and the relationship between Mum and her parents never really recovered. And her own life was unhappy - my two brothers were "blue babies" - Mum was Rhesus Negative - and the first died at a week, the second within hours of birth. In fatc, acccording again to family stories, there was no docotr available for the first baby, and the second labour, Mum was to go into the hospital twenty miles away, and the doctor forgot to book her in; with the result my father stood on the doorstep of the hospital and forced them to accept Mum as a patient. I can remember the terrible sense of despair that permeated life for me as a child; it has affected me all my life as a result.

But there was fun and happiness too; and excitement. My father had gone to the toilet one day, when he heard the sound of planes coming across the Essex Mareshes that lay to our east. He recognised the engines [he was an engineer] as German. And he realised that my mother had gone out into the garden to hang out the washing! Mum said the planes were so low as they came over that she could see the pilots' faces, and being an innocent, thought they were ours, and waved happily at them. Dad said he thought she was very lucky - they must have thought she was a German sympathiser, otherwise they could have machiuned-gunned her through to the front door.

Dad went into the Home Guard someitme after Dunkirk, as he was in it when I was born - when Grandma told him to go for the midwife he cleared the front gate in full uniform complete with gun and tin hat!