“Don’t worry, children, it’s only a bit more of Mister Hitler’s frightfulness,” our governess, Miss Heslop, used to advise us, as though speaking of somebody’s extreme ill manners. I don’t believe Adolf actually killed all that many of us in these diversions -- surely not nearly as many as we roasted of his poor citizens in Dresden -- and he certainly spread very little in the way of terror among the younger boys of London and its environs.
— son of Dr. Robert Arnold Woodhouse, and Josephine Langton Woodhouse. She was my father’s second wife, his first (Joan) having died in childbirth: Robert, thus our elder half-brother, was a Mosquito pilot in World War II, killed over Arnhem. He seemed somewhat god- like to myself and my younger brother Hugh; at around nine years and seven respectively, we thought the Blitz on London great fun, like the V1 flying bombs and the V2 rockets, many of which fell around Romford and ourselves.
My father
