I'd like to more about U all, if U R willing to share

i have 3 children that i adore.

The second world War Was raging when I was born. My father was away in the Army. My mother bore me in her parent's house in Fife. For some reason that I never understood we later stayed with an Aunt in Chatham. A toddler by then, Chatham suited me very well. I loved to play with the aluminium tinsel I found each morning in the garden. It was chaff, dropped by enemy planes to confuse our radar, but what did a two year old care for that. It was bright and shiny, and there was little that was bright, shiny or colourful to be had.

Being rather too hot a place my mother took my older brother and sister and me back to Fife. We lived in a small gatehouse cottage where my great aunt lived in the big house. I vaguely remember the cottage. I now know it to be a typical single story grey stone Scottish cottage. I remember well the telephone wires marching down the road. They would sing softly from time to time. I did not know or care that the singing indicated a conversation over that line. The other big memory was the day the butcher took me in his dark blue van to spend the day with his twins boys. Their toys were a treasure trove of wonders. I wonder what my toys were like. The only one I remember from that period was a Dinky toy motorcycle. This time was lost and my big brother threw it out of the window. I searched in the garden but never found it. Strangely, or perhaps not, I'm not at all clever at finding things that I am looking for. I complain that they do not wave to me. Now I have a wife I ask her and she is very much more clever at finding what I'm looking for. Often they are  right under my nose.

A while later we moved some ten miles to a small town. It was a grey stone house with a large square garden to one side  enclosed in a high stone wall. My sister and I, I probably just watched her without any understanding of what she was doing, built a frozen snow house one winter's day out of flat slabs of frozen snow. put all sorts of an English shape out of your mind. Our ice house was the traditional shape of a British house. When finally completed, excitedly we climbed inside. Almost immediately the roof fell in on us. Blocks of snow falling on our heads and a confusion of snow particles. My big brother was delightedly knocking the snow home down on us and dancing round the wreckage he had created with great glee.

Then a strange man joined the household. He was big and growly and rather frightening. My father was home from the war. I did not like the change even if he did give us chocolate cigarettes. Somehow that memory is muddled up with my first grapefruit. A great fuss was made of this fruit. Why? I could not understand. I had never known anything but shortages and rationing and that was just normality to me.

Each of us children were given a taste of the grapefruit. Somehow an Aunt and my two cousins were there too. The other children screwed up their faces and pronounced the fruit to be 'horrible' or 'nasty'. I loved it. To me it was delicious and with childish innocence expressed my delight. "Nonsense," said my Aunt unkindly. "You are just saying that to be different." I was given no more of the grapefruit. But I did like it. I like sour fruit to this day. The injustice of her remark rankles still some 70 years later.

xxx