MY LIFE AFTER we returned to Sutton Coldfield was stable, disruptions caused by the war largely came to an end, we remained in the same house throughout my schooldays, had very much the same circle of friends, and I followed a course of education from primary school to secondary school without interruption. My father practised dentistry at home, my mother worked part time in various clinics, and also, being trained in anaesthesia, put my father's patients into temporary sleep when a difficult extraction had to be made. My father tended my teeth until I was living in Australia many years later.

Even though the number of domestic servants throughout the country had plummeted dramatically as they found more lucrative employment opportunities during the war, my mother retained a maid called Rene, inherited, I believe from her mother-in-law, and Rene was almost a second mother to me in my very early years. My mother once told me that her mother-in-law had told her when they married that she did not want her son to be involved in domestic chores, and I can only imagine how my mother – professionally trained and a liberated woman – may have responded to that. Rene, however, in effect became part of the family, and even accompanied us on holidays to the coast. She was with us until her fiancé, Albert, came back from the war in 1945, they married and went to live in Stoke-on-Trent, where Albert worked in a ceramics factory painting decorations on pottery. My father made it clear that he didn't want me making a lot of noise in the house while he was treating patients, so that Rene told me that if I continued to be noisy, she would close my mouth with sticking plaster. I am sure she would not have done that in practice, but I took her threat seriously and was wary of her for some time after that. I doubt that it made any difference to the decibel count.

After Rene left, we had a succession of cleaning ladies. There was one, whose name I forget, who gave (sold?) us a collection of poems she had written about life during the war. There was a young woman called Linda, whom I identified as a misery-box.