the guy ropes. We had packed her cot – but she could climb out easily although we laced the top backwards and forwards with rope. Most evenings in the dark we would become aware of a little figure in a white nighty setting off across the Downs towards Brighton and someone had to run to retrieve her.

On our last day we didn’t light the fire so the ashes were cold. We were all busy, taking down the tents and packing up when we became aware that Gale and Margaret were sitting on the camp fire site rubbing the ashes into each other’s hair! The two men had to go many times the hundreds of yards to fetch a bucket of water before we could get the girls clean.

Milk, like everything else, was rationed then so we cleaned out the water bucket and the farmer filled it with milk for us to take home. This we fastened onto the “ceiling” of the van, which seemed a good idea at the time – but we arrived home with half a bucket of milk, the rest liberally distributed over ourselves and our belongings.

While we were away the Americans had dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus slaughtering Japanese women and children in payment for the brutality of the Japanese soldiers, and then war in the East was over too. Peace had come.

We worked hard for the Labour Party during the election of July 8th, even though we were not enamoured with Herbert Morrison, our candidate in Lewisham East who had run the London County Council before the war and was a friend of our parents. We had to wait a fortnight for the results to allow for the counting of the Forces votes. Arthur and Peggy joined us in Blackheath in a little local pub on the evening of the final result. We had not expected a landslide, but we got one. Britain had its first Labour Government with a proper majority. The air was full of hope.

My mother was approached by the new government to go as an ambassador to the women of America under the Ambassador Lord Halifax, and managed to slip out of the country on Friday October 10th before the press got hold of the news, so they came and interviewed me, and tried to put words into my mouth. Of course, they got most of it wrong, as they generally do, under the headline “Glamour Grandmother Flies to America”, and her photograph was on the front cover of Picture Post, a famous and popular magazine of the time.

While she was living in Cambridge she had acquired a boyfriend, Professor Norris, one of the atom scientists who was in the process of inventing lasers. Now he left his wife and twin daughters for Spikey, a silly thing to do as she was out of the country. So he used to come and cry on our shoulders. He had been invited along with the five hundred other most