Doodle-bug Baby

The droning suddenly stopped; a gasp hung in the silence that followed. Somewhere in the night, not far away, the bomb dropped and the windows of the ward shattered with the explosion followed by the terrifying sound of flying glass.

In the relative safety but total darkness of the hospital corridor, an indignant cry rang out, lustily resentful of its entry into the world. The mother smiled, loving the smell of a baby she couldn't yet see.

For that baby growing up in streets where gaps full of rubble were play areas had seemed like fun, an adventure, nothing more. A visit to Portsmouth in the aftermath of its near destruction hadn't meant much either. She remembered little except gazing up at blackened buildings that rose into the sky like jagged teeth in the mouth of old Tom, the ferret man. Her father had told her not to be afraid and taken her by the hand to see the warships in the harbour. Rationing was just a word to a child who had never tasted chocolate. How could she miss bananas when she had never seen one, let alone bitten into one?

Then it was the coronation and the old world turned new. A young Queen Elizabeth walked falteringly down the aisle of Westminster Abbey and returned a crowned sovereign, long to reign over us. The post-war child embraced everything that went with the new age, education, chances, love affairs and riotous living. The Swinging Sixties and Psychedelic Seventies passed in a whirl of love and laughter, tears and fears, never dull.

"Normal life, as we know it," someone had once said, "depends on so many things." For this child born in the fading year of the Second World War, memories of the conflict are those relayed to her by the generations that bore the brunt of it.