War was the backdrop of my life as a small child born in 1916 when my father was a P.O.W. and my earliest memories are of the officers billeted in our house. They had very white teeth, laughed a great deal and fed me delicious chocolate. When my father returned he had blackened teeth, frowned a lot and had only a few wispy strands of hair. He was very thin and pale and I apparently drew away from his embrace and cried, “I don't like you!” How I must have wounded his feelings with that tactless childish remark but I think he eventually forgave me.

My youngest sister, who joined up for the ATS in World War II, was at home with my parents when Winston Churchill gave his War Declaration Speech to the nation on the wireless in 1939. She told me recently of our father's reaction when he listened to the news that we were at war with Germany . She said that he burst into tears and rushed upstairs to shut himself in his bedroom. The trauma he received when he was a young man as the result of his experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war in World War I never left him.

Then down came the backdrop of war again. For safety I went to South Wales in a troop train with two small children under five and I was six months pregnant. On arrival the city of Swansea had been badly bombed and my husband's relatives were unable to take me in. I must have been one of the few pregnant evacuee mothers to have her fare paid to get back to London. It was at this time that the ‘doodle bugs' and then the V2 rockets began to appear over England .

As Britain celebrates the 60 th anniversary of victory over Germany the government is finally preparing to pay the last of the war debt owed to the United States . The Imperial War Museum is setting up an ‘adopt a veteran' scheme in which old soldiers go into schools to talk to pupils about their experiences.

Published to commemorate the 60 th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, this book is a collection of poems, written by an ordinary woman born during the First World War, and broadly covers the 20th century wars, illustrating their effects on different people and places.