When I was 6 years old we moved from Docklands to East Ham, from St Leonard’s Road in Poplar to 63 Gainsborough Avenue in East Ham; my mum and dad with all their children. The doors of Mission in Poplar were closed after our Leader heard again the Macedonian Call; go for me to Ireland..  Then the old pub was too big and the rent was too high for my mum and dad to take on so we moved ("further down the river"! - the River Thames that is). Dear friends from the Mission Hall days, Charlie & Ada MacDonald, opened a house in East Ham at the same time, so they continued the "Open Door" for God’s People and, from our new little home, we Brownings would troop round to that house every Sunday, and for evening Meetings in the week too.

I remember vividly the proud day when my dad put out his sign "G. Browning" for his long-distance transport business. That was a proud day. But then I remember the trauma when he discovered a lorry he purchased in good faith had not been paid for by the previous owner. So back to the drawing board... and poverty street. Mum of course was a clever tailoress and so we were all clothed, though it meant many hours at the sewing machine. And more time at the sewing machine doing little jobs here and there for neighbours keeping the wolf from the door!!

But one day, as we grew older, daddy said we’ll go back to bonny Scotland and see the old place again. I must have slept on the journey and woken to see a wondrous scene that took my breath away, like one of my favourite picture books come to life. Gone was grey London City. Surely we had arrived at ’Fair Canaan’s Land’ we had sung of so many times in the London Mission! My grandfather Hassan, my mother’s father, had come down from Glasgow’s city smoke and stood in the doorway of Granma Browning’s little white stone cottage in the midst of green fields and blue sky. This must surely be paradise.We had returned to our parent’s native land.

Then back we went to our new way of life in London town. Daddy called us "The London-Scottish". We started school, my sister Margaret and I, in kilts mum made us, and dark green jumpers (sweaters). Our playmates called us "Scotchy-Landers". Miss Black, my first teacher at Hay Currie Infant School, she taught us a song about the Bluebell wood, so my imagination took off again: surely there was a better place than this, where people could live amongst the flowers and blue sky and green fields..?

East Ham was our neighbourhood for all of  5 years. In 1939 we children had no idea that war was looming. When the radio announcement came we kids thought it sounded so exciting but one look at mum’s face told a different story. The ones who had lived through World War I had no illusions about what war would bring. We watched as they took some of the finest cars to scrap for metal for the war effort. As with many other children in London, we were not immediately evacuated but the day came when we could put it off no longer.

We had gone up to the shops one morning with mum and we went into Woolworths which in those days used to be opposite the train station. When we were almost done, mum said we could each pick out a small thing. My younger sister chose a little plastic bracelet. We paid for our things and left the shop. Then my sister, only 6, realised with dismay that she had left her little bracelet behind. This moment will be forever etched in my memory because right then, the air raid sirens began to wail. My little sister was crying and begging mum to just let us get her bracelet but my mum hurried us home as fast as she could.

That day Woolworths, being so close to the railway station, took a direct hit. Daddy had us piled into a long distance lorry with a good mate of his and whisked away to Scotland. For a child, and especially in the circumstances, that’s a far distance. It was July, 1940. Not all of us went at once, only my two younger brothers and me (my big sister and little sister staying behind with mum for a couple more months when it could be put off no longer).

What seemed like a great adventure at first (how much we loved Scotland) became very hard and difficult as winter came on and there was no returning to mum and dad. Another thing I will remember to the day I die; I took with me my beloved teddy. Yes, I am sure he was as ragged and threadbare a bear as ever there could be. And I broke my heart when he disappeared. As an adult, I could look back and see how someone might have thought he was only fit for the fire but as a child I was inconsolable, hunting high and low for him (no one ever let on what had become of him!).

By October, the bombing had got worse in London and our two sisters (the eldest and the youngest of us) joined us at granma’s cottage, and mother went to Glasgow, back to her father’s tailor shop, but also to nurse her own now invalid mother, while my father drove his oil trucks, forever North and South for the War.

My brothers, so small for their age, worked on the land, and we girls worked in ’The Hall’ or the Big House, a training that was to stand me in good stead when I had a house and family of my own to cater for. I sometimes wish we had education and careers like today but it had its compensations. On account of the war, we were the last of the ’Victorian’ Servants; there was only us, who were so young, and those that should have been retired cooks and butlers. The able men and women in between were all called up for war service.

Six long years until the Victory Bells began to ring, the men could come home and the world settled back on its axis once more. Mourning was everywhere; how much mourning; the mourning was to go, on and on... even as "Plenty" gradually came back to our rationing shores...

All we ever saw of that awful War was from our skylight window in the cottage; the flares dropped on Glasgow. We had trouble enough of our own; skinny and weak, malnourished London kids. The cold was bitter and the work was hard. But down the country we remained and learned the country ways. Daddy got me a bike and with all the up and down of those country roads, I did grow stronger. They always said I had Rickets as a child but years later when I described the symptoms to my son-in-law doctor, he said that wasn’t Rickets, that was Polio. Certainly no one ever expected me to go on and carry 7 children and I certainly didn’t expect to make old bones but here I am, in my 80th year! Who could believe it!!