A wartime Baby

My arrival was not the best time to be borne. During the second world war when my dear mother worked in a munitions factory nursing the injured machinists prone to having small fragments of metal shed into their eyes. The diet at the time was meagre and for me included dried banana and powdered egg. To buy any food at all required the ration book to be shown and I believe there was something like four ounces of butter or margarine allowed per week. My father was working away from home surveying. Bonding with his first son never took place. My first and second brothers arrived at three-yearly intervals with a fourth brother arriving when I was twelve.
In the early years, my mother made soft toys to supplement the family income but soon after war ended their first home was bought close to the seaside. After a couple of years, it was sold in favour of a larger house on the seafront but the cat ran away and I was ill with tonsilitis.
Another move took us a mile or so back from the sea, but it was another victorian terrace and not well heated. I remember several winters sharing a bedroom with my two brothers and that room faced north. Frost would often form on the inside of the sash window.
Those were not the happiest years of my life, with parents often squabbling for reasons I could not fully understand. I was maltreated by this unpredictable father and felt some resentment even towards my mother for tolerating his behaviour.

My early education was unsatisfactory as well, due to the fact that I was sheltered from mixing with much of the rough and tumble to be found in the community. My father believed he was a cut or two above the rest, so I was put into a tiny little private school of seventeen boys, under the one proprietor/schoolmaster, who had his favourites and had put his retirement on hold. The rest of us boys were less well encouraged to learn anything at all. I learnt to make pea shooters and cotton-reel tanks.
Consequently, I failed my 11+ and reached secondary school, but the woodwork master and music masters both saw that I had potential and I was entered for the 13+ to grammar school to be further educated.

By that time the family had moved a few miles down the coast and I had built my first canoe as well as many a balsa wood model aircraft and a model boat or two. Tools were hard to come by and I remember frequently cutting fingers on the makeshift razor blade tools I could find.
I taught myself a rudimentary kind of ballistics, having access to spent cartridge cases and black powder or propellant gleaned from fireworks.  My father made his own cartridges for his punt gunning sport. Today I would probably be locked up for my exploits.
At this time cars were fewer on the roads and children would happily run off to explore the countryside or seashore without any worries.
At seventeen I obtained my driving licence at the first attempt and within a couple more years acquired my first MG two seater. It was a barn find at £45 and driven back from Pipers Pool in Cornwall.
That sports car was later sold to be replaced by a better MG open sports model which absorbed all of my savings.
To a greater or lesser extent, I suppose I am today re-living those years, albeit with a lessened vigour, but undiminished in terms of enjoyment. My mother always said enjoy yourself while you are young - they are the best years - I found her pessimism to be unwarranted.