In 2004 I interviewed my mother and recorded the stories of her life. As a child she had told me these stories many times and they had always fascinated me. Both my parents came to England after the war to work and create a new life, my mother from Germany, my father from Jamaica. My father was very quiet and never shared much about his beginnings in Jamaica, but my mother told me everything, maybe too much at too young an age. She was someone who needed an audience, and I was it. I would listen, wide-eyed, to the extreme events she described, growing up in Nazi Germany. My mother was a latch-key child, with a working mother and an absent father, in 1930s Berlin. She was bold and street-wise, but powerless in the face of the extreme events happening around her; the disappearance of Jewish neighbours and friends, followed by the terrors of the 2nd World War. I wanted to write these stories down so that they wouldn't be forgotten. At the beginning I didn't think I would write a whole book about it, or that I would end up writing about myself as well, the impact her story had on my own and our relationship with each other. It took over a decade, with many agonising stops and starts. It took all my guts and a lot of crying and doubt. But I'm very proud of having made the journey and the result. Right now I'm looking for a publisher to unleash it out into the world!