内容摘要：They believe the Pope represents a direct line back to Jesus Christ. He is considered a living successor to St Peter, who was chief among Christ's initial disciples, the Apostles.

They believe the Pope represents a direct line back to Jesus Christ. He is considered a living successor to St Peter, who was chief among Christ's initial disciples, the Apostles.

"I'd never seen a sheep, there were no sheep in Guernsey in those days, I'd never seen a cow that wasn't brown and white."There were black and white things in the fields, I didn't know what they were because they weren't proper cows."

The train took them to Stockport, Greater Manchester, where the evacuees stayed in the town hall."They gave us children toys and I was given a drop-side cot," she said.Ms Mathers still owns the cot she played with, adding her grandchildren play with it today. "I treasure that because it must be over 100 years old now, mustn't it."

Ms Mathers and her mother were eventually offered a place in the home of a local family."My mother and I were taken in by a lovely family named Robinson, who lived in Frodsham Avenue in Stockport," she said.

"My friend from Guernsey, Jennifer Till, she didn't have a mother with her, but she was also taken in by a family in Frodsham Avenue, so the two of us could go to school together, which was very nice."

Ms Mathers said they were moved around during the war, living in Cornwall, Poole and eventually settling in Liverpool.The elections analyst Sir John Curtice argues in

that "the mainstream is dead", five parties have a chance of making real inroads in these contests and what stands out now is that both Labour and the Conservatives are struggling, rather than the conventional dynamic of one being up while the other is down.The Conservatives have spent weeks talking up how down they feel about these elections.

And senior Labour folk too are cranking up the gloom in the conversations I have with them.Which then leaves us with Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and an often overlooked element of local English democracy – independents.