It is only now that I am older and wiser, and know so much more about my parents’ history, that I can understand why my mother must have found it hard to adjust to such a different life. She had been brought up in poverty by a widowed mother of three, had been evacuated for several years from Portsmouth, a naval town, before leaving school at 16 years of age to work, and help support the family. She had been nowhere outside of England. From the age of 17, at a time when the Second World War was entering its third year, she had joined the Army, where she was taught to drive a truck, a car, and a motorbike, and had then led a very busy life as a dispatch rider. Three years later at just 20 years of age, having been sent to Windsor Barracks, outside London to deliver dispatches, she had met my father, also a motorbike dispatch rider, and they had fallen in love on sight. My mother used to tell us that our father had looked so very handsome, with his curly hair and his brilliantly blue eyes. He had just returned from India and Burma, so was very tanned, too.
Despite living and working in different cities, a couple of hours apart, they were engaged to be married within six weeks, married within a year, living in London, and three months later were expecting their first child, me. By then, the war had ended, and she had worked as a telephone operator in Selfridges Store in central London until the day before I was born.
My parents soon had three children. I came into the world a year after my parents married. I was the oldest. John was almost two years younger than me, and Peter was almost six years younger than me. We were living in suburban London. My father had by then left the Army and was working in a clerical position for British Railways somewhere in central London, though I am not sure of whereabouts, exactly. My mother stayed at home looking after us children. She walked first me, then John and me to school, collecting us at the end of each school day. I remember this very clearly. At the end of the day, she would be outside the fence along with other mothers as they stood waiting for their children to emerge from the school’s building.
My parents’ life was extra busy, in fact, since, together, they also ran a mail-order business out of our home, first making up aquariums and selling tropical fish, and then, later breeding budgerigars. Nearby customers came all day long to collect their supplies. My mother would take various items to the railway station, to be sent all over England to customers who lived further away. We didn’t have a car, so this meant walking a mile or so, using the pram as a means of carrying all that baggage. I remember accompanying her, walking with my brother John, as my mother pushed the pram in which lay baby Peter.
