My parents, Lucy and Sidney, married in 1925 and lived in a small house in Custom House, East London. From their marriage until 1937, they had nine children, all girls, three of whom died in infancy. The family was bombed out in 1941 and evacuated to Reading. In 1943, they found their way to Brentwood in Essex where they all lived in a small rented house in the nearby hamlet of Pilgrims Hatch. To everybody's surprise, my mum gave birth to her tenth...