‘So the war had started. The people in the street seemed more relaxed about it now that it was here. They kept saying it would all be over by Christmas.’ From an early childhood spent sharing a house with the whole family, right through to returning to a war-torn and ruined London, Doreen Hines here chronicles her personal experiences as an evacuee. From hop-picking in Kent, to Mickey Mouse gas masks and shipments from the American W I, this memoir recounts the ways in which the Second World War affected the people, the family unit and the life of a young girl in the early 1940s.