JUNE 1944
The only time my mother got out of the house, generally, was when she went shopping, joining queues for meat and eggs and all that stuff. Apart from two visits to Holloway when Granny and Auntie"s house had been bombed she had hardly been over the threshold.
I know that over the last two years she had seemed worse; gloomy in the extreme and spending long periods of time when she wasn"t cooking meals or doing household chores, just staring in front of her. It worried me more and more as I became more aware of her grim demeanour and it brought my cousin Sheila to my mind. It would be terrible indeed if she became more or less completely silent and inert like my cousin.
Once Edward and Chuck had departed and my father only came home for one, brief forty eight hour spell, my mothe
