A birthday cake for two absentees

Emma Allkins, John Cubitt’s daughter, writes: I am attaching a photograph of my father and his twin sister and their 21st birthday cake.

Neither of them were at home in Scunthorpe on the day: 19 May 1945. My father was in Belgium and his sister was working with the Salvation Army Red Shield organisation in London.

D-Day was just after his 20th birthday. I volunteer with the air cadets, so I watch them grow up between the ages of 13 and 20 – and I often think about my father facing D-Day at that age.