I suppose the thing about the war was that it was my entire childhood and in the end it became a sort of normality. If you’re 5 when the thing starts and everything you knew about life, your home, and everything stopped and you were suddenly in a completely strange place and that’s the beginning of memory. And the whole thing about wartime England is that it was a normal childhood to me so one has to fish around and thing of the things almost in retrospect.

At the beginning of the war I was on holiday with a sort of childminder I suppose in Lincolnshire. My father was still in London where we lived in Swiss Cottage and my mother was with the Labour Party Women’s Delegation to Moscow and for some reason they decided – I think, very sensibly – not to come home by train when war was declared because they would have come slap into Hitler’s marching into Poland and they got themselves out to Stockholm. Anyway she got herself back to England and my parents did what a lot of other parents did, they panicked about children in London…and so I remember my mother finally appearing in Lincolnshire and we went on a great journey from Lincolnshire to Cornwall – Boscastle which I suppose was the other end of the world, and it was one of those journeys which has just stayed with me and given me a fear of trains almost. Trains were packed with soldiers, packed with people in all directions all and all the timetables went completely adrift. I remember once we were told we could get out and go to the buffet for a cup of tea and we saw the train with all our luggage just shunting out of the station. It reappeared again about quarter of an hour later I think. But anyway, it took two days to get ourselves down to Boscastle, where we lived on top of a fish and chip shop.

The next thing I remember was that the school I had been at in London we discovered had been evacuated to Royston on the Hertfordshire/Cambridgeshire border. And it was one of these progressive schools where everyone was very chummy and joined in and the teachers had spent that first term of the war turning the stables into classrooms and barns into playareas. And they had built some Nissen huts which were our dormitories, which actually wasn’t a very good idea in the end, because we were on the beginning of the flat bit of Cambridgeshire where all the big aerodromes were – big Battle of Britain aerodromes and later on the Americans - so any German plane that wanted to offload its bombs would aim for us on our hill in our nissen huts.

In fact bombs were one of my earliest memories. I think it was one of these long train journeys, of which I remember lots, I remember everyone saying "Look can you see the bombs, can you see the bombs?" and I knew, I absolutely knew that bombs were rockery stones so I very obstinately looked out of the window and I couldn’t see any rockery stones at all. All I could see were some silver fish. And all the adults around me were getting extremely cross and I was wailing, "I want to see the bombs, I want to see the bombs".

But there was a lot of puzzlement. I remember my father getting dreadfully agitated about the "serviettes" and their pact with Hitler and I could not understand any of this – it took me a long time to work of course that it was the Soviets. And it was the anger of the adults all around me and their sudden change of landscape, everyone suddenly in uniform. It was a really great puzzle.

Anyway the school got itself to this hill and I suppose for most of the war we were reasonably safe there, but whenever the raids came I remember the younger children, of which I was one, we would be immediately carried down to the shelters and I have a memory of being carried by the big boys (I suppose they must have been about 14, 15, but they seemed really grown up to me). And sirens wailing and we went through this wood and down into this shelter. And there was one member of the staff, a Mr Morrish, who always used to read to us and I suppose, during the worst of the bombs, we must have worked our way through every single Doctor Doolittle and Professor Brainstorm book there were. So in a sense the raids were a bit of a treat: Because we were woken up and wrapped in blankets and then read to instead of being told to be quiet.

But there were a lot of discomforts too of course. The food was absolutely appalling, and the dreadful grey loaf I remember and a sort of longing for fruit. And the food thing became quite interesting for me because my mother had – I suppose her only skills were secretarial – and she managed to work herself into the position of being a Food Executive Officer. And the Food Office in fact was the centre of the whole bureaucracy of the war for the civilian population and my mother was in charge of allocating the various caterers in the town their allocation of sugar, meat and everything else. And even as children the importance of the ration book was really central to our lives. We were never allowed to lose it. When we were very young we weren’t trusted with our identity cards and we all had to recite our identity card numbers. And then after the war it became our National Health number and I reckon anyone of my generation knows their National Number almost automatically because it was drilled into us that we had these sets of figures and numbers. That’s who we were.

My mother’s work in the food office was fairly central. She became quite a local character in the town because of this, and because there was no transport and she in fact lived on a farm (a neighbouring farm to the farm where the school was) we were all having to use bicycles. And my mother because she was short and fat was not the best person to learn how to ride a bicycle. And there was a tale that she kept the fish queue amused and the fish queue got very much longer in the lunch hour from the Food Office where you had to go and look at Mrs Tabor practising trying to ride her bicycle.

In fact at one stage there was that bit in the middle of the war when the raids stopped, before D Day when I think life in a small country town was really very peaceful. But there was always that feeling that something was about to happen and for us children what happened was the arrival of the Americans. And we had this thing that they were coming, they were coming, they were coming. And I have this great memory of these endless convoys just rumbling through this tiny town, car after car and truck after truck and I don’t know if my imagination even sees the tanks, but this drab olive green and these white five pointed stars. And then after a bit we started to see them in the town. I suppose this was the most exciting of the lot because it was the only centre for miles around for rest and recreation. And there was a 30s roadhouse there, which had a small dance floor and a swimming pool and a cinema and that’s where the Americans would congregate – I suppose to pick up the local girls. But us kids thought they were fascinating and we used to do the old thing of following them down the road shouting "Got any gum, chum? Got any gum, chum?" We even used to try and sort of sing "The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming" but we never got any further than that, we just didn’t know the words. And in fact I was lucky because my mother, by this time separated from my father (this all happened at the beginning of the war when my mother got back from Moscow and found him with another woman) so everything changed from that on and my mother I suppose welcomed the arrival of the Americans because she was taken out dancing and I think she had a great romance with one of them, who in fact gave us wonderful treats from the PX and the chewing gum and the Hershey Bars came our way, which was an enormous treat.

Life at the school was really, I suppose, very harsh in a way because we were very cold. There was very basic heating. The huts had those round-bellied stoves that just only gave out a certain amount of heat. And we all got so very cold, and we were I suppose deprived of a lot of things, cheese and milk. And we got the most ferocious chilblains especially us little ones, and we had these terrible pussy fingers all the time where the chilblains had got big and swollen and cracked. And after a bit the local doctor came up and we all had to have vitamin injections and I suppose it must have worked because I only remember one winter when they were absolutely and completely ferocious.

Then I think the doodlebugs happened. They happened about the same time as D Day. That was the beginning of me being scared. I don’t remember being scared till then. The raids were just fun because of Professor Brainstorm and Doctor Doolittle. But that was the beginning of being really quite frightened and we would watch them go over. But what deeply deeply scared me were the V2s and I think that’s when I was growing up and managed to feel that this was seriously dangerous.

People have asked me since whether I had any feeling about being Jewish and aware of that threat. I don’t know whether I have completely blotted it out, I might have done, but I have no feeling of that at all, I have no feeling that it was a particular danger aimed at me. It’s funny that because presumably I must have known but it didn’t seem as dangerous – I mean more so to me that anyone else.

Living with the things like the 4 inch baths and the blackouts and the darkness just seemed normal. The only thing that didn’t seem normal was the uniforms and every time one went anywhere - I remember we occasionally went to the next town which was Hitchen or Letchworth – any train was so crowded with uniforms and kitbags, just making your way down a corridor was a real obstacle course of really weary and depressed soldiers. There was a feeling really of being enclosed by uniforms everywhere. I remember one of the adults saying to me "Have you noticed that the only girls with good legs are all in uniform? And that’s because they’re healthy" And that was one of these inexplicable remarks adults made. And I remember staring at girls’ legs and trying to work out what was pretty and what wasn’t. Couldn’t understand that remark at all.

Later on, when the Americans left, which they did once D Day had happened suddenly they weren’t there any more, and very soon after that the Italians, who had been in a prisoner of war camp on the heath just outside the town, were allowed to roam free. And it was like one army of occupation, which was the Americans, had been overtaken by another army of occupation, and suddenly our town was invaded by these dark, voluble, very foreign-looking men in their dark brown uniforms. So we’d lost the olive drab of the Americans and suddenly we had the dark brown Italians and I used to wonder what the poor souls were doing just standing there, and they had no money, there was nothing to spend their money on, they weren’t allowed to go into the shop, they weren’t allowed to fraternise, they were just standing there. They must have been the most homesick people in the world. And they got replaced just after the war finished by a grey/green army and which was the German PoWs who looked even more miserable and sad. I think some of them worked on the local farms and that was probably better and easier for them. Very strange.

My mother burnt down the swimming pool, that’s my story anyway, she probably thinks she did, so after a bit.. She was there with her American friend one night and she lost her cigarette…and it all burnt down that night. And that put a great damper on any social life during the course of the war. That was the end of Royston as a centre for R&R I think.

Towards the end of the war it did start getting grim. There was this feeling of a real weariness that it couldn’t go on and it couldn’t go on and as we were getting older, we were getting more frightened.

I suppose one of the things I remember most as a child, were the posters. The Central Office of Information must have had all the best cartoonists. I remember Fugass, who I recognised really later, was always being used. And there was a creature called the Squander Bug, who I remember looking rather like a large spotted peanut, who went around sitting on things, and you weren’t meant to squander resources. And the other one of course was "Careless Talk Costs Lives" There was an awful lot of sort of wonderfully exhorting posters everywhere that I remember thinking "Yes we’re winning" and there was "Dig for Victory" of course that was a very famous one. My favourite was "Keep calm and carry on", that was a good one, you know the stiff upper lip one. They were very good.

Another puzzle of course was all the talk about spivs and black market. For some reason the big confectioner and baker in the town was a man called Beale, and all the local adults – I think he was really on the fiddle most of the time - and all the local adults used to say in front of us kids "The BM" and when we asked what that meant, they wouldn’t say "Black market", they would say "Beale’s Manufacture". As if this was a way of shielding us from these terrible realities. The thing is, we got involved because one year on my birthday, the most luscious cake appeared, I mean really a cake that had not been seen, covered in icing and cream and things. And my mother got very suspicious, you know, Mr Beale had sent her this cake for my birthday. And she started looking through all her allocations and somewhere in the allocations of butter fat and sugar that Mr Beale had got, my mother had put a wrong decimal point and he had got ten times the amount of whatever it was…and he obviously thought she had done this on purpose and this was the sort of kick-back. And my mother was a very sort of probic person so she rushed in and said "I’m sorry I’ve made a mistake, I’m going to have to cut your rations, or your allocation for the next year". He was not pleased, Mr Beale, and after that there was no more cakes and ale for us.

Oh I wish I could remember more of the posters they were very splendid. And the other thing was the great pall of smoke that was over everything. Everyone smoked. My mother, who had never smoked before and never really since…I think it was just what they did. If you were just standing in the street, walking around, chatting, everybody had a cigarette. That was part of the morale building thing. Where did they get the tobacco from? How did the tobacco arrive in the country? All those poor people being killed on the Atlantic convoys, just to give everyone lung cancer I should think. I don’t know, the most extraordinary things came into the country. I mean there we were getting our concentrated orange juice and our rosehip syrup to keep us fit, and all the adults were dying from lung cancer. Oh well.

The doctor thing was quite interesting too because I think again all the fit people were in fact in the army and so many of the local jobs were done either by the unfit or the very old. And all the very doctors in the town were finally pensioned off and I remember great excitement when a Doctor Schiller arrived who was clearly a German Jewish doctor who had I suppose been interned and they let them…they finally sorted out who were the Nazis the English had interned on the Isle of Man, and who in fact were the genuine refugees. And when he came to town I think there was a dreadful prejudice against him. People stopped going to the doctor or went to the other very aged, the one and only aged GP left, who had huge queues. Of course my mother resolutely went to see Doctor Schiller who she thought was a perfectly splendid doctor. It was odd, it was odd. But that must have been towards the end of the war. I don’t remember when the internment on the Isle of Man finished.

I wish I could remember VE Day better. I think it was just the impatience that this extraordinary thing was going… our lives were going to change. I wonder how many of us who couldn’t remember pre-war, who only had these sort of memories. Pre-war meant "that" – it’s so far in the past. And post-war, I think most of us would think, "oh, we’re going to have banana". I remember that was the big thing, we were waiting and waiting and waiting. I don’t think we got a banana till about four years after the war. Because I think the war continued, the rationing was just as stringent. And it was 1952, when I was 18, before I walked into a shop that I wasn’t registered in, and bought half a pound of butter and I remember feeling very, very wicked as if I was taking part in the black market. So there isn’t in fact that clear demarcation at the end of the war because the rationing continued and the shortages continued.

After a bit the school went back to London. There again, that all took a year, as indeed I think, it took a year for people to be demobbed. And that’s why we had the Germans sitting around, the disarmed and terribly dispirited German PoWs because of the actual organisation. The war had stopped and you had all this army here and all those PoWs there and the poor displaced people in central Europe and all the camps, and actually there was the logistics of sorting all that out. So there wasn’t this wonderful moment "the War is over" and back to whatever we remembered – normality.

We did have street parties, incredibly funny street parties, I think they must have taken such a long time….oh at our street party I remember a pig, which was in fact raffled and I was always rather hopeful that we were going to win the pig but we didn’t of course. And we had a sort of parade and all the children had to dress up and wheel our bicycles which had all been wrapped in red, white and blue bunting with a great "V For Victory" on the handlebars. And we were children of the allied nations. And I drew the unlucky straw of being a Dutch girl in a rather unbecoming hat as far as I can remember. I think that must have been towards the end of ’45, in the autumn.

I think the adults all went out and danced and got drunk and had a much nicer time at the end of the war than us kids. I mean, at 11, what do you do, you just wait for your banana, I think. And that’s what we did.