I'll tell you some fun tales about my mother ( long passed away).
She was an engineering student when the war broke out (WW2). She felt it wrong to go to to a university while people were fighting the war, so she took a job with a chemical company doing lab work on paraffins,(which were used in napalm and flame throwers in the war).
When the war ended, Dad was in the Pacific on the Missouri when the truce was signed on the ship sept. 1945. He came home two months after the signing. They got married a month later, and of course, she was pregnant right away. Three months later, Dad was sent to England to help with medical treatment and transport of the wounded from both sides. He was German born, and spoke fluid German, so he was especially useful with wounded prisoners being repatriated. He came home to assist with the delivery in Sept. 1946, and after two weeks went back to England. Mom could not come until my older brother was 4 months old. At the end of a very exhausting trip across the Atlantic, nursing a 4 month old, she arrived in London. Dad had made friends with a well to do British couple who wanted him to bring his wife and baby over for dinner when she arrived. They set up a guest room so she could get a good nights sleep before moving into the tiny apartment over a pub that dad had found. There were all sorts of delays ( as was the case with everything at that time in London), and it was ten at night when they got there. They had held dinner, and even though all she wanted was sleep and someone to take the baby for a few hours, she sat down to eat. After a while of talk about the baby and the trip, the hostess turned to Dad and said, "Egon, Mimi is certainly a saucy lass." The husband chimed in with, "And homely,too." Mom burst into tears and ran from the room. Shortly, it was all sorted out. Saucy meant bright and spirited, and homely meant the perfect homemaker/wife.
The people became my older brothers God-parents, and after a short stay in the cold one room apartment, arranged for the family to live in a mansion on Hyde Park that belonged to friends of theirs. The owners wanted to leave London until the town returned to some semblance of order. The house would have to be turned over to the housing board if it was not occupied, and there was no such thing as a storage warehouse left standing. So they let Mom, Dad, and my brother live in the monstrous house with all the furnishings and effects until they returned to England two years later. Dad arranged to be transfered back to the states at the same time.
Fast forward to 1963. There were three teen age boys by then, Mom decided to return to college, and received her degree in 1966, then went after her masters in Old English literature. Her specialty was Falstaff. She wanted to study the oldest copies and other books available, so they were transfered from other universities to Old Dominion. She had to learn to read and speak Old English to understand them, so I became her study partner in OE. We would go to the research section at the library, where she was allowed to study the ancient books (we had to wear white gloves). I would read them to her in OE and she would transcribe by hand what I read. I got pretty good at speaking pre-Elizabethan English.
Most of the OE is long forgotten now, but the great memories are still there.
