We found a first floor flat to rent; Peter had been posted to the race-course and the flat was nearby. We sent for our bikes. The army doctor soon decided that Peter could not cope with army food so he was allowed to sleep and eat out. I found a job nearby teaching in a small private school for a term. All I can remember about it is that the children, who were quite young, had peas on toast instead of beans on toast for lunch. Then I joined Pictorial Charts as a research assistant and general dogsbody. Peter settled down to a life of gastritis and dull acceptance of his predicament.

For something to take his mind off the war we started to collect pre-revolutionary Russian stamps, and together spent many happy evenings in our flat ruling out pages and looking up stamps in Gibbon’s catalogue. Very few people collected Russian stamps so we were able very cheaply to build up quite an interesting collection. We also joined the Anglo-Czech Friendship Club. There we met a Sudetan German Czech who had escaped just as Hitler had marched his armies in. Sadly his wife and two children had been on a visit to her parents so he had had to leave them behind and didn’t know whether they were alive or dead.

Peter was promoted to Sergeant. We got to know a young man, a capstan lathe operator. Originally he had lived in Wigan where he had been trained for seven years as a skilled sheet metal worker. In those days the metal sheets had to be made perfectly flat by hand. Then in the slump almost the whole town became unemployed and he soon lost his skill. One small factory was still working and the town’s children would line up outside as the workers came out to beg for any crusts left over from their lunch.

His married sister lived in Leicester and invited him for a week’s holiday. While he was there the dole people found him a job as a nightwatchman at ten shillings a week. He had to take it or lose his dole. So the whole family had to move to Leicester. Now he had a good job but the years of privation had ruined his digestion and if he spat into the fire he produced sheets of flame, his spit was so acid.

My Pictorial Charts job proved interesting. I did do what typing and so forth was required but mainly I had to research the statistics to produce the bar charts or pie charts to be published in newspapers to inspire people to more war effort.

Peter’s job was to get batches of new recruits through a simple examination or test about army rules and regulations as they applied to clerks and storemen. When he went in to teach one new intake he found that the first man he looked at had only one eye. Hastily he shiftedhis gaze to another – but that man had only one eye too. Anxiously he glanced