My family took in evacuees during the war. We lived outside London and this officious lady came and inspected our house, we had two extra bedrooms and she said “you can have four” and my mothers face, I remember it. Four!

It was boys and girls that came. At first, being a child myself I didn’t like to have other children in our house, but poor things they had to come somewhere. Their families used to come down at the weekends.

Food was so short I don’t know how my mother managed. My father had an allotment and the garden and we used to grow everything and my mother used to make wonderful meals with hardly any meat. We had a butcher in the village and he used to say Mrs I’ve got some liver or whatever and she used to make it feed all this extra family.