In the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth I found the leaflet: How to look after your pets in wartime. City dwellers were encouraged to either evacuate their animals or have them put down and in the first days of the war some four hundred thousand London pets were humanely gassed by the RCPSA. Dogs were not allowed in public shelters, nor was it recommended that they shared family shelters in case they panicked when bombs fell. Cats, on the other hand, were less of a problem while caged birds and goldfish went to and from the shelters with their owners.

In the corner of the painting is my car Rommel, so called because of his field grey coat and propensity for spending much of his time out on manoeuvres.