Joyce Taylor is making the photographer laugh, telling him how she fell out of one of the trees in her Suffolk garden recently while trying to prune it. She’s always been a tree-climber, she says, despite being small. Her two brothers, who were six and seven years older, called her “Titch”.

“I do envy today’s children their comfortable clothes,” she says. “I was perpetually coming home with my clothes torn and my ribbons lost because I climbed trees.” It was wartime when Joyce was born and almost everything was scarce. Wool jumpers were unravelled and knitted up again into other things. Clothes were handed down from her brothers, so her socks were grey and her shoes black. Her mother was forebearing, she says, when she arrived home from school one day wearing just one of these unfeminine items, having lost the other while playing in a local pond: “I think she could see I was terrified.”

“There was this magical time called ‘before the war’,” she says, “when you could get things and have things and do things.” Life in the village where she grew up, near Caterham in Surrey, was completely changed by the war. “I should say fear was continuous. We had bombing within about a mile of our house. All the factories and houses were flattened. To begin with we had a rather splendid air raid shelter, but after a while we didn’t bother.” Even after the war ended, things didn’t change much.

“I don’t remember getting more food, really. You more or less had potatoes and carrots and cabbage. You could tell what day of the week it was by what was on your plate. You had roast on Sunday and cold meat on Monday because it was washing day and the copper would be going and steam everywhere. My mother might have minced up the bits and made shepherds pie on Tuesday. Then soup on Wednesday. We only had chicken at Christmas. Chicken was a treat. Otherwise it was beef or lamb.” What there was, in abundance, was freedom: freedom to roam in the woods, to fish for tadpoles in the water-filled bomb crater near the little village school, to potter up the road to see a friend. Incidents that might now be thought untoward, even violent, were met with stoicism.

“Once when I was very tiny we were playing in the field and an Alsatian started to play with me. I fell down, and it whizzed me round by my plaits. When my mother brushed my hair that night it fell out,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I just said: ‘It was the Gibsons’ dog’.

“Another time I wanted to join the boys’ gang, and they said: ‘Well you can if you let us push you down this bank into the nettles three times.’ So I said yes. They pushed me into the nettles. I didn’t cry. It just made me a tough little thing.”

Despite her parents’ lack of concern at her tomboyishness, there were still many things not considered proper for a girl.

“I used to resent being a girl. My mother really would say, ‘You can’t do that, you’re a girl.’ She was virtually Victorian in her outlook. Not that I wanted to be a boy, but I wanted to do the things boys did. Girls were expected to be deferential to men, and get married, and do as they were told.” If she wasn’t out and about, she was looking for something to read: “I could read before I went to school – anything that came my way. When I was at home, after I ran out of things to read, I would take the 1880 encyclopaedia and read that. I can remember before starting school, going to the grocers with my mother and reading the words on the sacks of rice. In the little school in the village, we had boxes of books that came once a term. Enid Blyton, things like Mallory Towers. And I was allowed to have Sunny Stories – Enid Blyton was serialised in that.

“When I took my 11-plus it was no big deal. I felt no pressure whatsoever. When the results came through, and my name was read out as having passed, I thought, ‘Oh? Really?’ I think I went home and said: ‘Pat Bridge has got a wristwatch for passing the exam.’ So in the end I think I screwed them for a wristwatch.”

Grammar school meant an expensive blazer which had to be bought, and a dress which her mother ran up on the sewing machine. But she did not thrive there. “I’d spend three times the effort on not doing something that it would have taken to do it. I was a bolshy little thing.”

Her misdemeanours would be punished – endless lines and essays on pointless topics such as cotton reels. At primary school it had been the cane across the hand – “It was good, really, because you’d all look at it when you got outside.” There was also some basic sex education during the first year at the grammar: “It was pretty clinical. There was nothing about emotions. It was assumed it would be within marriage. In the fourth year, someone had done it. It went around school.”

Was she ostracised? “Oh, no! We all wanted to know what it was like! She was very streetwise, that girl. She was going with a bloke who was older. It wasn’t a question of morals, necessarily, but you wouldn’t consider it in case you got pregnant. Birth control was simply not there for young people.

“One day at school there was a chap in the churchyard, flashing. We all went to the window to have a look. We wanted to know what it looked like – we were a girls’ school!”

In her teens she found a job milking cows on a local farm, to earn money for stockings. There was a church youth club, hanging around with friends, smoking. Pubs were generally unwelcoming, spit-and-sawdust places: “You’d only go in with a boy.” Parents knew what they needed to know, she says. “Where’ve you been?” “Out.” “What you been doing?” “We went somewhere.”

Although her father, who was 50 when she was born and who had retired early from his contracting business, spent time taking her for walks and teaching her the names of the flowers and the trees, there was no notion of “quality time”. “Your parents didn’t play with you. They had you, and they looked after you. They were there. All this going to Mothercare and getting educational games. I just think: ‘Is it a game? Are they enjoying it?’ We were children for a lot longer. And I suppose we were much more innocent.

“I don’t think I’d swap my childhood,” she says. “It makes you what you are, doesn’t it?”

Times recommends

• Tewkesbury: when the memories flood back
• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• The A-Z of winter style rules