I was a war baby, born just four months before VE Day in New Malden, South West London. I have little recollection of those years,  but my older sister told me that a flying bomb destroyed a house in our street, and my older brother remembers sleeping in a Morrison shelter.

My family moved to Cardiff and then on to Barri Island when I was about four. It was there that I began to learn about ‘the war.’

For years, my views of the war were strictly black and white, with the heroic allies usually overcoming the Nazis. It wasn’t until I began to teach history in the mid-seventies that I started to take an interest in the reasons for the war. What really fuelled this interest was a devastating TV documentary called Before Hindsight.  I go into my reasons for writing about the second world war in my blog - which I hope you will read, along with my books, of course!