`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.