These are what hold my stockings up and I have no idea where I will find a replacement. Ironically it’s a real wartime problem.

Rubber, like so many other things was in short supply during the war, with the small and diminishing stocks that we did have been directed towards military equipment not for civilian uses.

My problem of course is not getting hold of rubber itself, but getting it in a useable shape. No one makes suspenders out of metal with a rubber washer these days.

My girdle and its suspenders are original and my only option for spare parts is to cannibalise another original garment, which I don’t want to do. Thus one stocking will be even wrinklier than before.

Oh Nora Batty, how much I have come to resemble you.

Sigh. Just one more thing that makes me feel really frumpy. Wartime styles remained so much the uniform of that generation, regardless of later fashion, that they have come to be synonymous with older, decidedly unglamorous women.

In the sixties and seventies when the young were playing around with weird and wonderful shapes and bright colours the wartime generation stuck with their hardwearing wool, knee length skirts and sensible shoes.

Headscarves and pinnies, sturdy stockings and muted colours have become shorthand for dowdy middle age.

There are times when it gets me down a little, looking like that.

It is historically accurate and at the time was not thought of as old fashioned and staid, so I am happy with that but sometimes I do long for a little more sartorial flair.

The men, in turbans and uniforms suitable for the heat of the subcontinent, found themselves pressed into action in the fields of England between actions of a more military kind.

The picture was such a strong reminder of the vast geographical and cultural mixing that the war produced.

I felt how good it was to be reminded just how many people, from all across the globe stood shoulder to shoulder with us in our hour of need. And not just in the fighting itself.

Most of us are I hope familiar with the fact that troops from all over the empire and commonwealth did their bit, that Australians and New Zealanders, Indians and West Indians, Canadians and Africans were an integral and vital part of our armed forces and that our allies included Americans, and Poles fighting from our own shores.

Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the four corners of the world passed through our ports and camps.

A little less well known are the civilians who came to help. Over 30,000 people came from the Caribbean for example to help run the factories of Britain.

What must it have been like to stand in the British countryside and watch this great procession of people coming through?

The great cities of Britain had long had a degree of multiculturalism, but this was on an unprecedented scale, and not confined to the ports and other traditional settlement areas, this was everywhere.

What must those Sikh men have made of an English wheat field and what did the farmers make of them as they worked alongside.

Prejudices must have come to the fore, and just as often have broken down in the face of real people.