I was born in England in the small mid-Sussex town of Haywards Heath on 24^th May 1941. I was a wartime baby if that is of any significance? I suppose it was significant, but perhaps more significant was the fact that Haywards Heath is a rural spot and was barely affected by the increasing war activity. I may have sensed that daily life was not quite as it should have been, but if it was a way of life that I had always known I could not be expected to think it should be different?

My parents were married just after the outbreak of war, and my father volunteered for service in the RAF and seems to have been posted in the Middle East soon after, so his periods of home leave were rare. I never really got to know him until after his ‘demob’ in 1945. We lived with my maternal grandmother, in her “front room”.

I do not propose to give a chronological account of my early years during the war: I couldn’t if I tried, but just a few random memories that have always stayed clearly in my mind.

Haywards Heath was not near any major targets for enemy bombing, but the German flying bombs often missed their targets and one such ‘doodlebug’ fell in the local recreation ground. There were no casualties but the blast took out my Gran’s kitchen window. We were always reminded of the event years afterwards because the wartime replacement glass was poorly produced and the broken panes always distorted everything seen through them.

A more momentous event took place when my mother was walking with me in the pushchair in the local countryside. We were on a footpath alongside a farmer’s field and suddenly an aircraft approached very low. I don’t suppose it was an enemy plane, but I do know that my mother grabbed me from my pushchair and threw me into a furrow at the side of the field and crouched over me while it passed. She was evidently very frightened , but I don’t think I registered any danger.

Two events which were more directly redolent of the worrying times were the construction of a Morrison “Table Shelter” in our already overcrowded front room, and more frightening to me the issue of gas masks. My mother and Gran had the standard issue black ones , but I had the children’s red “Mickey Mouse” design. I have always hated any clothing near my face and I remember my mother struggling for hours to try to get me to put it on! She finally got the hook and eye fastening clipped together behind my head and I could not get it off, couldn’t breathe and was in a total state of panic. A little later when I started at primary school I carried it to school in its box: fortunately there was never an occasion to put it on.

I never knew my grandfather: he had been killed in action in France during the First World War. All I knew was that we shared a birthday: Empire Day 24^th May. My grandmother had “a lodger”. Nobody seemed to know where he came from, or at least they never talked about it! Alec, or Uncle Alec as he was to me, became the principal male influence in my early years. I don’t think I liked him very much, and the feeling was probably mutual, for he always called me”Little Bugger”.

Before she was married my mother had worked as cashier in a small, rather smart department store in the nearby village of Lindfield, and one day when we were out walking a very smart lady, apparently a former customer in the store greeted my mother and turned to talk to me in my pushchair. “ And what do they call you, young man?” she asked politely,“ Little Bugger!” I replied.

As I have said, Haywards Heath was a fairly sleepy backwater in those wartime years. It had yet to see the sort of expansion that was to come soon after the end of the war, due principally to its greatest asset: a major station on the London to Brighton railway line. Shopping facilities were limited, as of course were things to buy in them, especially things like children’s toys Gran had a big tin of buttons of all types and sizes, recovered from discarded garments over the years, and my mother threaded them all on a string for me to have as a plaything . That string of buttons went everywhere with me until one fateful day, walking along South Road, the string broke! No attempt was made to recover the buttons!

A final anecdote! Dad came home on leave from foreign parts bearing gifts, among which was a large hand of fresh bananas. This little boy had never seen a banana before and fled the room in terror!