My parents’ generation were all shaped by the Second World War. They came back from the adrenaline rush of Dunkirk, D-Day, ‘the Med’, Haslar Naval Hospital and the Manchester Blitz to become accountants, work in corner shops, to be mums and school assistants. The war moulded society in the 1950s, and hence, in the way of history, it moulded my own life too.
When I was a child I had a jigsaw of the kind David Matless illustrates in , the ‘Victory Plywood Jigsaw Puzzle of Industrial Life in England and Wales’. Every county was its own cut-out, even tiny Rutland. I loved the detail: shipbuilding on the
