‘The English Rose that wasn’t’

It is a portrait of an English Rose.The pretty blonde girl in the photograph is looking slightly upwards and beyond the camera lens. Maybe an adult standing in front of her has just said something funny or silly to her to get a reaction, because her eyes are twinkling and she is smiling, her lips parted revealing a slight gap between her two front teeth.

Her hair is long and curls down onto her shoulders. She is wearing a plain checked buttoned-up shirt; it looks new, perhaps purchased for the occasion.The girl is maybe ten or eleven years old, which means it is 1944 or 1945 and the German bombers that demolished houses and killed her neighbours on the road where she lives in Morden, south London, no longer strike fear. The World War is coming to a close or is just over, and maybe it is the new air of optimism amongst the adults in her family that is putting the smile on her face. Her name is MaureenYvonne Barnett.