My Mother and I during WWII

My mother, unimpressed with Jennifer, then she had never been impressed with any other person in my life, once dropped a flower pot from the balcony as Ruth and I were leaving her third floor flat, it missed us by an inch, my mother was oblivious to the resilience of youth, Jennifer, simply laughed at her, dragging her down to the "Robin Hood" by the river, not that the old lady needed much dragging. A strange, lonely woman, my mother, ever since I could remember, contriving to leave me alone somehow so she could slip out to the pub. We were both alone, my Father mostly on night work, sleeping all day; yet, she was always intensely possessive towards me, bitterly resenting any other woman that cropped up in my life. My wife, she never met, she only ever saw two of my many children, her grandchildren.

We had been taken up to Hockley at the very height of the blitz by my Father, stayed in a house with three or four young sisters, no Mother, their Father I could never recall seeing.. The German bomber pilots, the clever ones, would not venture over London to drop their bombs, but would jettison them, very often round us as we were on the flight path. Occasionally, this was in the evening, mother up the pub, the girls and myself huddled together in a corner of the room, petrified at these explosions reverberating harshly across the open Buckinghamshire countryside. The one particular occasion, a very quiet evening, after the excitement of the day when our school house had been machine gunned by a stray German fighter plane.

Whatever, my mother had still crept out into the darkness of the night, after giving some brief consolation, after a few words of comfort, after lighting the gas lamps. She had gone the few hundred yards to the pub; nothing could ever deter her from this. Throughout the blitz, other than during the time of the docklands inferno she never missed her evening out, such was her strength, her determination... I had taken to my bed, almost asleep, when one of the sisters slipped in beside me. "Peter... I am frightened" she whispered... We fell asleep together. The awakening was rude and harsh. My mother screaming at the top of her voice, the girl fleeing from the bed, from the room, in tears. I have never forgotten that one particular night, surrounded by so much hardship, misery and fear, my mother saw fit only to exacerbate my own particular agony ... at eleven years old.