My father, the local doctor

  “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 spread very little in the way of terror among the younger boys of London and its environs.

Born 1932 in Romford, Essex, England

—  son of Dr. Robert Arnold Woodhouse, and of Josephine Langton Woodhouse.    She was my father’s second wife, his first (Joan) having died in childbirth: Robert, 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 and seven years old respectively, we thought the Blitz on London great fun, as we did likewise of the V1 flying bombs and the V2 rockets, many of which fell around Romford and, during school holidays, ourselves.