内容摘要："It's hard to believe that a man can get up and walk forward under machine gun fire as if it didn't exist.

"It's hard to believe that a man can get up and walk forward under machine gun fire as if it didn't exist.

The Conservative leaders of Harlow, Braintree, Epping and Essex county have not backed the five-council model - and neither has Thurrock's Labour leader John Kent.The Labour government has been encouraging areas across England

, and to elect regional mayors who will be given more powers.The five new councils in Essex would be unitary authorities, meaning they take charge of all local services such as bin collections, highways and social care.Essex County Council's social care currently takes up more than half its £1bn budget.

Each unitary authority would govern between 320,000 to 500,000 people and would have an estimated 60-90 elected members - which the Essex plan says will ultimately cut down the number of councillors across the county.Politically, the fewer and larger the councils are in Essex, the more likely the Conservatives would win control. This is on the basis of how people in the county have voted in recent elections.

And this is partly why Labour and other parties have been calling for five and the Tories preferring fewer.

Essex County Council leader Kevin Bentley, who favours larger unitary authorities, said: "The worst outcome for local government reorganisation in Essex would be to recreate the mistakes of the past elsewhere in designing new councils that are too small in terms of population and income – meaning people ending up paying out more in council tax which means less money for family budgets.""My brother was a Royal Marines Commando, the other was a Spitfire mechanic, so I wanted to do something, too," she says.

Eileen, from Sewards End, near Saffron Walden, Essex, was sent to a farm at Takeley, near what is now Stansted Airport, where she lived in a hostel with 16 other girls."Growing up with two brothers, I wasn't used to being with a group of girls, but I absolutely loved it," she says.

Eileen had grown up in the East End of London and left school "with not much of an education" at 14."We lived near the River Thames. When the war broke out, nothing really happened for a few months, and then one Saturday we were sitting around the kitchen table and we heard the planes coming up the river. They started bombing us," she remembers.