Life for the postwar baby boomers has been full of opportunity and change. But the fight for freedom and a better world continues

In 1942, aged 18, my mother was running for her life with her father, mother and siblings, heading for an air-raid shelter as bombs pulverised Portsmouth, turning the city into “a tomb of darkness” as one diarist recorded. During the war the family were to lose their home twice as the city and its docks became a prime target. My mother was wearing a new coat so when her father ordered everyone to hit the ground, she refused. A bomb splinter gouged one side of her back. A female ambulance driver risked her life to drive my mother to hospital through the raid.

I was born in 1948. My mother and father lived in a bedsit and saved a few shillings a week for her confinement. And then, like millions who had endured six years of war, they had their just rewards. “The destruction is so awful and the people so wonderful, they deserve a better world,” wrote the future Queen Elizabeth to her grandmother, Mary. On 5 July, the NHS was born. It no longer cost a couple dearly to have a baby. I came along a few weeks later, a citizen of the new “cradle to the grave” welfare state. As historian Asa Briggs said: “War has necessitated welfare.”