The Telegraph: Children in the Second World War missed far more school – are today's parents worrying too much?

Many children in the 1940s were denied a large chunk of their schooling, but like today's kids they showed extraordinary resilience.

When I used to whinge about going to school, my father told me he’d have given his eye teeth to go at my age. Lessons were a novelty when he first came to the UK from Poland as a 15 year old in 1948…

As a little boy, he’d looked on with envy as his older sister ran about in the playground. “But when the time came for me to start, the war broke out and I missed it all.”

My mother’s early education was ropey, too. She grew up in Essex, just west of Tilbury Docks on the banks of the Thames - a target for German bombs. She remembers school days spent in windowless brick air raid shelters in the school grounds.

“We were 50 kids in a class with one teacher. They used to try to teach, but we couldn’t write because it was so dark. We chanted our tables, we learned poems off by heart and we sang ‘roll out the barrel’. And there was a single toilet behind a curtain.

Until the last year of primary school, she never had PE lessons, never did any craft or sewing. “You had to be ready to go to the shelters at any moment.”

Read the whole piece on The Telegraph’s website