stood no more chance of dying than anyone else. He suggested that perhaps we shouldn’t wait any longer for peace, but should try for a baby. Almost at once I found I was pregnant.

Perhaps we had been a little over-optimistic. The Germans stepped up their bombing of London. Already, before we got back from Leicester, the church next door but two had been demolished by a high explosive bomb, which also brought down our kitchen ceiling and broke all but one piece of my mother’s marvellous blue china. Now, night after night the siren would go and Peter would bully me out of bed and down the curved wooden stairs to take shelter under the very sturdy large kitchen table. Several times I sat down on the wedge-shaped stairs and went to sleep, to be roused again by Peter who wouldn’t leave me but longed for something more sturdy above us. I wasn’t worried – the calm of pregnancy protected me and my baby.

Peter was suffering all the symptoms described by old wives’ tales. As I grew larger he grew iller; so at the beginning of July the army doctor at Kidbrook, where he had been transferred from the War Office, decided he must have a grumbling appendix and he was whipped into an army hospital to have it out. Army spit-and-polish demanded that the floors of the ward were like glass and all the patients held their breath as I negotiated the “ice-rink” to visit and cheer him up. Then he was moved to Army Rehabilitation in Surrey.

There were still three weeks to go before baby was due and I was missing Peter. One morning I got up early, left a note for Helen and David and caught a train. He was a bit flustered when I turned up, very large, and unannounced, and I wasn’t allowed in, so we went for a walk in the July fields and forgot to keep an eye on the time. It would never do for him to be late for lunch, so we ran, leaping over the stacks of wheat, and he just made it back in time. As we had no phone then we arranged for him to phone me at my father’s house at 6pm every second day. This would give me time, I thought, to have the baby before he could have a nervous breakdown with worry.

Gale was due on August 14th, a Saturday. On Thursday August 12th I was alone in the house when the door bell rang. There in the porch in full uniform stood our gallant Sudetan German Czech from Leicester. His face dropped a little when he saw my condition. I think he might have been nursing a faint hope of a farewell to a hero. He was to be dropped behind enemy lines the next day and wanted a bed for the night. That I could offer so he came in. Helen was at work at the Admiralty as resident mathematician to help Andrew Huxley decide what guns new ships should carry, and David was out somewhere, so we waited a bit for them and then ate what I could provide.