I was born in London in 1935. By the summer of 1939, it was considered wise to get children out of the city before the war started. I wasn’t separated from my sobbing mother at Victoria station and put on a train holding a gas mask. Instead, my mother and I went down to Devon to stay with my grandmother, who had rented a house in the village of Torcross.
In London, the war did not stop for Christmas. Toy shops before the war had sold small forts modelled on the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Now boys in the city wanted toy planes like the ones they saw flying overhead.
But in Devon in 1940 things were still peaceful and we had a big Christmas lunch with all the trimmings. We were joined by an uncle whose job it was to pull bodies out of bombed buildings in London.
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