For some long-forgotten and surely misplaced medical reason, I was forced as a child to take spoonfuls of vile white poison called Hypol. It may have had some sinister connection with cod-liver oil – I no longer know or care. I mention this arcane information because Robert Macklin’s memoir War Babies, is the first example know to me of Hypol’s appearance in a literary work. I don’t recall anyone else mentioning ‘the Rawleigh’s man’ from whom my mother, not liking to send this hawker away without a sale of any kind, would buy jelly crystals.

The first half of War Babies is full of details resonant to me and, I suspect, to many other readers of a certain age. It’s not just the trade names, but slang terms and clichés, moments of childish awe at the strangeness and excitement of life, all seen through the eyes of the very youthful protagonist. Robbie, who will later, as a jackaroo, metamorphose into ‘Bob’. There’s the Silent Knight refrigerator (ours was very unreliable, as I recall, and given to puffing out fumes that darkened the kitchen ceiling); there are girls who ‘get the giggles’; there is a non-churchgoer who claims descent from ‘a long line of Calathumpians’; there is a ‘sook’, a ‘spine-basher’. a ‘confirmed bachelor’ and lots of ‘Aunties and Uncles’; boys come ‘busters’ off bikes: and father goes to ‘the rubbidy’.