Ordinary people from Tottenham - their war.

1940. My mother, pregnant with me and having a six-year-old daughter, decided to evacuate to Peterborough.

I was born in January 1941 and my mother decided to return to Tottenham, London. As most trains were used for war work it was not easy to travel. My mother did manage to get a train full of mainly troops but could not get a seat and so stood in the corridor all the way from Peterborough to Liverpool Street Station with a six-year-old and a baby of a few months together with a bag of a dozen eggs (worth their weight in gold), mum said.

A couple of years later (the war still on) my father who was in the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) in London, my mother, sister and I were staying with my grandmother in Park Lane, Tottenham. Our rented house in Asplins Road was destroyed along with most of the road by a V1 bomb. My parents, who had been married since 1933, had bought new furniture in the late 1930s for the house in Asplins Road, however the council would take any furniture etc not damaged to the Tottenham Hotspur Football Ground where you could collect it once the council rehoused you. There was a delay in the rehousing and they did not get to pick up the furniture for some while and when they eventually arrived to pick it up, it had been taken by somebody else. The council supplied them with second-hand furniture.