My name is Beryl Smith. Yeah. I was born on the 18th of April 1943 in Islington, London, right opposite the ladies prison, Holloway, and we had a couple of rooms in the top of the house, and every time you wanted to go to the toilet, you went all the way to the bottom of the house, and every time you wanted to go back up, you went all the way up to the top of the house. Every time anybody knocked on the door, you had to go down and open the door. 

It was after the war when they were beginning to repair places that we actually had water put on, because we had to have two buckets, one for the dirty water and one for the clean water. And that's about down to the bathroom, clean water in one, dirty water way down the toilet and was flushed away. And then you carried it all the way upstairs again! 

But no, my mum and dad were quite poor. They'd had a daughter before my sister was born but sadly she died at five years old when measles was on the rampage. So I think my mum was three months pregnant with my sister, who was born obviously six months after, and then I was born five years after that.

So, but being a big gap like that, it wasn't sisterly sisters. She'd run off with her friends and leave me to get on with my friends. But the main part of our childhood was in the summer, the six week summer holiday, because we lived on a main road and my aunt, we used to go down to my aunt's for six weeks summer holiday every year. And that was a good thing I looked forward to, well we all did, going down to my aunt's in the Cotswolds. 
And my mum would stay for a week, then my mum would come home and leave us there and then she'd come back a week before we were due back at school and take us home again. But we had some lovely times down there. Because my mum was born and bred there tt was always, we were Ruby's girls, when they coming down? My mum used to say ‘well, they'll be down in so and so’.

Oh, we had some lovely times; paddling in the brook, doing fishing in the brook, only little tiny tiddlers. My uncle was the baker so we had a big meal down there. And they used to mill the corn and bake the bread and what have you.

That's beautiful. We just used to wait and wait and wait just for that day to come when we got on the train and off we went. Oh, I was lovely. And you know all the kids in the village were waiting for you. Because although I didn't live in the village, everybody knew me because I had two aunts, three cousins living in the village, they were all in the village and all the rest were the church yard. But yeah, it was a lovely time.