When my mom was a child, she lived through the Blitz. They lost one of their houses and their cricket school. They came home after being gone for a weekend and everything was hanging in the trees, blown to pieces. It was awful, devastating. Everything that you knew as a child is hanging some place or lying in there road. It is an incredible feeling of not just loss, but loss of identity.

Suddenly who you are and everything that got you here is gone. It was a hard time for them. This was on the coast by Sussex. Grandpa was in one of the civil guards. They put drain pipes lined along the cliffs to look like big guns.

My uncle was on one of the big ships that stopped the Nazi onslaught. His ship was destroyed and he was killed.

When the bombs dropped, they mad that horrible whirring, then the sound would stop and they would hit.

My mother went into nursing. The only choices at her age were to drive truck, work in munitions factories or be a WAC. Home nursing at that time was going from house to house on a bicycle. There were no clean sheets, only newspapers.

I graduated from High School. I went to a private girls’ school graduated when I was 16. Then I went to do my BHS (British Horse Society), because I wanted to ride. I really wanted to go into the riding. I used to go fox hunting all the time with my mom.