I found the last stages of labour very hard work but I felt no pain. I think I produced my own painkiller. I heard the phone ring at 9pm. “Tell him to hang on,” I shouted, “the baby is just coming.” Sure enough, at 9.05 there was Gale and Peter learnt that he had a daughter.

My Dad came to see the baby next day – more than he would have done for her, my mother said, when she arrived a few days later. Then Peter came. He had a good look at Gale, “A Japanese gentleman I presume!” he said. She did look a bit Oriental at first as her head was a bit squashed and she had a lot of black hair.

In those days we had to stay in hospital for ten days. All day we had to sit bolt upright in bed except for an hour after lunch when we were made to lie on our tummies. As my mattress was a bit short I often found I was sitting on the springs of the bed, and as I had stitches it was not exactly comfortable. The ward was a Florence Nightingale type holding fifty mothers. The babies were kept elsewhere and brought to us only for feeding. We could often hear them crying and longed to cuddle our own but were not allowed out of bed for the first week.

Each evening, before they went off duty, the day nurses insisted that we drank senna. The night nurses, who always seemed to be well out of call delivering babies, locked up all the bedpans! No-one in that ward gave a thought to air-raids and bombs falling near! We had more important things to concern us. After the first night I led a strike. All fifty of us refused to take our senna unless bedpans were left out for our use. Matron was adamant. She would not have her ward looking untidy, even at night. But we still refused. Finally she had to allow the bedpan cupboard to be left unlocked at night. Those nearly ready to go home and so allowed to get out of bed took it in turns to fetch what we needed. We had won.

We had little else to do but talk. Of the fifty of us it turned out only three missed our husbands. The rest only wanted their mothers and boasted of their own frigidity. “Turn over iceberg,” my husband says; and “Look what you’ve got me into, you bastard,” to an embarrassed husband brave enough to visit.

When Gale and I got out of hospital, as Peter was still being rehabilitated and the bombs were getting worse it seemed wise to take her out of London. I learnt of a wonderful woman doctor, Doctor Sutherland, who had taken over a large farmhouse in Privet where she now lived with her two children and her husband, recently invalided out of the Navy after drifting for three days around the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy, his ship having been torpedoed. Dr Sutherland made it her war work to take in young mothers whose husbands were in the Forces and their newborn babies for a few weeks, to set them up and keep them safe. At that time there were seventeen of us, with seventeen tiny babies.