Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.
If I really had to pinpoint my happiest days out of the United States, I'd choose those Fifties military days in Britain, particularly my time in South Ruislip. I had a ball.
I fought for peace in the fifties.
Up until the War of the Roses there had been continual conflict in England.
I was born in 1935, so I was quite young when the war started. I remember we were in Bath, and it was 1942. We went down into the cellar of our house, and when we came up, I remember seeing all the glass on the floor where all the windows had been shaken out by the bombs.
If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.
You can't understand Twenties England until you appreciate it was under a cloud of mourning. Nearly everyone was grieving.
The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.
I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.
It's quite an interesting time, the '20s, because the politics of England were changing quite a lot, and the class structure was starting to shift a little.