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I was born in Palmers Green and attended the local school for a couple of years before moving to East Barnet and my first change of school. I had not been there long when war broke out and my mother took my brother and I to her sister's in Nottingham and yet another school. As nothing much was happening on this side of the channel we soon returned.
With the start of bombing my father thought that I should be at a school nearer home so I changed to Russell Lane school, where I seemed to spend most of my time in the cloakroom with sandbagged windows and holding my gas mask and lunch box.
On many nights, during air-raids, we all crammed into next-door's Anderson shelter in the garden.
However, on May 10th. 1941, during one of the last air-raids on London, a German bomber was hit by one of our local AA guns and dropped his stick of bombs, one of which hit a house two doors away and exploded. My brother and I were sleeping "top to toe" in a bed in our backroom. My father was in the kitchen and was knocked out by all the saucepans falling upon him, but my mother was in the hallway and rushed into the back room to find us covered in broken glass and the curtains, yet sound asleep.
Because she had not been able to see us, she thought that we were either dead or had been blown out of the french-doors. We were very surprised to be woken up and told to get dressed as we were going to stay with neighbours down the road!
I had already taken the written "eleven-plus" and was then due to take the oral part of the exam the very next day having had to borrow a uniform from a friend to go along to East Barnet Grammar School. Not surprisingly, I failed!
Subsequently, the Government discovered that they were condemning too many damaged houses and ours was eventually repaired so we returned and bought ourselves an indoor Morrison shelter. As my father had always wanted me to go to a convent, I took the entrance exam for St. Angelas and began yet another school.
However, when the "doodle bugs" and V2 rockets started arriving and my father was by then in the army in France and Germany, my mother took us again to Nottingham and yes, to another school! We returned just after V-E day and now, back at St. Angelas, we were the first class to go back to the Wood Green building, which had been used as Government offices during the war. Very surprisingly, I did quite well in the old "school cert" exam and then went to work at the Bank of England.

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