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six-footers.’ As things transpired, this was clearly the voice of experience.
    * What the song does not say, of course, is what happened to brave Daniel Donnelly. Despite all the glory (as well as a knighthood), he died in 1820, a hapless drunk with not a penny to his name. But the story of Donnelly would fire little George Cooper’s imagination before long.

CHAPTER TWO
A WARTIME CHILDHOOD
    ‘The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.’
    JOHN MILTON, Paradise Regained , (1671).
    T he Cooper family was as dislocated by the war as anyone could be. Almost as soon as their council house on the Bellingham Estate at 120 Farmstead Road was ready for them, they moved in and the order came that all three children were to be evacuated.
    This was a depressingly common transaction during the war and entirely as a result of the pessimism which governed policy concerning the likely outcome of a war with Germany. Estimates concerning the probable level of casualties had resulted in some fairly dismal arithmetic. Gloomily, the Committee of Imperial Defence had predicted, in September 1939, that the first German air attacks would last 60 days and result in 600,000 casualties. An appropriate number of papier mâché coffins had been prepared and stacked ready, a million burialforms had been printed and issued and plans had been made, upon the outbreak of war, to simply evacuate more than one and a quarter million women and children from the major inner cities into rural or suburban areas before the Luftwaffe did to London, Liverpool and Glasgow what it had done to Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The evacuation policy had some interesting outcomes, in fact, as the two economic nations really met each other for the first time. For the Cooper twins, aged six, it was to prove a bruising encounter.
    The attitude of many households, almost invariably better off than their unwilling guests, was frankly hostile in many cases. Stories had begun circulating at the end of 1939, of unspeakable, unwashed children, both verminous and feral, pouring out of the inner cities, completely unfamiliar with such social imperatives as flushing loos or even underwear. One Glasgow mother was reputed to have scolded her six-year -old when it chose to relieve itself in someone else’s home: ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady’s carpet; go and do it in the corner.’
    Given that the Cooper family was scooped up and redistributed rather late in the overall process, Bernard, Henry and George (who were most certainly not in that category, as Lily had worked as hard as she could to ensure that her sons were a credit to her) were on the receiving end of a certain inbuilt prejudice when they arrived in Lancing on the Sussex coast in early 1940. Bernard went to one house, the twins to another. It was the England of Dad’s Army , even down to the location, but sadly devoid of humour.
    The twins’ new landlady, a Mrs Holland, seemed to takethe view that if their presence was an inconvenience, then it was probably their fault rather than Adolf Hitler’s. She had up to six other guests at times, including, inexplicably, a three-month-old baby. As custodian of the collective ration cards she could be expected to feed the children quite decently.
    But, alas, not as well as Lily had. A seemingly endless diet of jam sandwiches was the usual fare, and while all three boys attended the local school, the only other attraction of a seaside town, the beach, was strictly off-limits, being both mined and festooned with barbed wire. Should a German invasion arrive, the Cooper boys, along with the rest of the population of Lancing, would have a ringside seat.
    They would certainly witness the aftermath of Dunkirk as well as have a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain, but Henry’s recollections are mainly concerned with the sheer misery of it. ‘We all had to sleep across the same bed; this little baby would wake us up at some ungodly hour and I’ll