On the whole we had got used to the Incendiary and ordinary High Explosive Bombs – but now the Doodlebugs (the VIs) started coming over the house. These pilotless planes flew slowly and low. When you heard the engine cut out you were in trouble. I had been taught that babies needed fresh air, but no sooner was Gale settled in her pram in the garden than I heard the ominous hum of an approaching Doodlebug, so would rush out to rescue her. It was no life for a baby.

Peter had been posted to a base at Kidbrook nearby but he was not at all well. The army is not a suitable institution in which to suffer clinical depression.

He was still suffering a lot of stomach pain even though he no longer had an appendix to grumble, and he alternated between being sure he had stomach cancer, and being equally sure he had an ulcer and was soon to die.

He ate less and less.

He cycled back home from the army for lunch but would put his hand on his folded arms and sleep on the table throughout his lunch hour. Of course he wasn’t sleeping at night. Sometimes he wouldn’t or couldn’t speak to me for all of twenty-four hours. The only way, I found, to get through to him was to make him angry, which took days of work!

Obvously we were doing each other no good, and Gale was suffering. Relunctantly I took her to stay with my sister-in-law in Coventry, which was now bomb-free, and Peter went into hospital again. There he was injected with insulin, to put him to sleep, into a coma, and they roused him on alternate days to eat mounds of mashed potato. This dangerous treatment was used as an alternative to electric shock threatment, which would have been even worse. He also had sessions with a psychiatrist, a female, but never told me what went on, afterwards. Then they invalided him out of the army and Gale and I returned to be with him. He went back to teaching at Stratford Grammar School. As far as we were concerned the worst was over.