'My earliest memory'

Growing up in the 1940s meant using World War II blockades as diving boards and suffering diphtheria, for this elderly couple.

Janet Whitehouse, 70, was evacuated from London to Bournemouth during the first years of the Second World War. “I was separated from my sister” she says glumly “But everyone went through it”.

Being a war child meant more than being away from home, as she describes how food was rationed and the way her and her friends used the scaffolding along the coastline to jump into the sea. “We used to get shouted at to get off. It was meant to keep to the Germans from invading, not as our toy. Oh, it was so much fun!”

Janet is celebrating her golden wedding anniversary next year with her husband Roger Whitehouse, 72. They first met at the jazz club on the parade, where Rogers’ parents ‘dragged him along to!’

He has lived in Dorset all his life, growing up along Hamilton Road in Boscombe.

Rogers’ eyes gleam as he remembers his earliest memory, of the struggle he faced fighting diphtheria as a child. “I didn’t expect that kind of pain when I was two, I’ve never experienced anything like it!”

He is undoubtedly a man who has learnt to take things in his stride, saying he felt lucky to survive as “most small children my age didn’t”.

But it wasn’t all tears and tantrums for Roger as he recalls “watching the spitfires fly overhead” spending whole days down at the beach, in such an air of innocence.