IN THE middle of a line-up on the school playground, alongside a policeman, a chimneysweep and a Dutch girl, stands a small and very solemn Little Miss Muffet.

The photo will be 60 years old on Sunday and that Little Miss Muffet, clinging tightly to the wooden bowl which normally held Grandad's egg money, plus a wooden spoon from the kitchen, was me. The celebration was, of course, one of thousands hastily organised in towns and villages throughout the country for VE - Victory in Europe - Day, May 8, 1945.

The grown-ups who'd risked fancy dress must have stayed out of the photographer's way and all I remember is one man with a "bust" of a red and a blue balloon, probably quite daring in 1945, and a Chad, looking over a cardboard wall bearing the legend "Wot no coal?" There weren't many men, of course, as the young enough and fit enough were mostly in the armed forces and, for some, unspeakable experiences still lay between them and VJ (Victory over Japan) Day the following August.

The children were all village kids as the evacuees, for we were the sort of quiet spot to which they were sent, had largely gone home, except for the postman's two, who never did.

For us little 'uns it was just fun, an unexpectedly jolly afternoon for a reason we didn't really understand. With fish paste sandwiches. Only those of you a decade or more older than I am will be able to remember accurately how it felt to wake from that six-year nightmare. Then it was current events; now it's history and part of the GCSE syllabus, but the war years on the Home Front retain a fascination for women of various ages - witness the popularity of tales set among families of the period which must, I suppose, count as historical novels.

Maybe it's admiration, or memories, of the make do and mend and the coping with rationing; the way women took on the jobs of the absent men in heavy industry; the "Blitz spirit" which refused to be daunted by Hitler or Lord Haw Haw or even the very different morality of those days, but a glance along the bookshop's paperback shelves will show how many authors have taken 1939 to demobilisation in 1946 or so as their setting.

Would we face up to a crisis now, as British women did then? It's hard to tell as any crisis would be so very different, but I like to think we'd give it our best shot.

Looking through articles from wartime issues of a women's magazine, I noticed constant references to salvage, to making do and to saving fuel and it struck me that the same message could equally well be punched home today.

Then our recycling and economies helped the war effort. Today, putting out our recycling boxes and switching off lights and the stand-by on the televsion might help to save the world not from war, but from global warming. The enemy may have changed - may not even exist say some theorists - but the Home Front is still a line of defence.