They stayed at a house in Church Road, Old Hunstanton, where she recalls: "We were mostly unhappy."

With hindsight, she feels she can understand a little better the unkindness they encountered from their host family.

"There wasn't too much food about and they weren't asked to take us in, they were told to, in spite of having five children of their own," said Mrs Hanscombe.

With her brothers, she was later moved to a "hostel" in Hunstanton which she recalls as Dickensian.

"They were cruel, cruel, cruel to us," she said. Her memories include being slapped, forced to stand for days and cold-shouldered by other children.

During the filming of the programme, she was taken back to the hostel building in Lynn Road. "No way could I go in. Even after all these years it still affects me," she said.

Ironically, several bombs fell on Hunstanton while she was living there. She eventually returned home, but was later evacuated again to Blackpool.

"It was completely different there. I loved it. I liked the family and they had a lovely little boy, Jimmy, who was two," she said.

Jimmy's mother, Lily, longed for a daughter and suffered five miscarriages trying.

Lily wanted to adopt Mrs Hanscombe and was upset when she decided to return home to her family. Afterwards, she finally gave birth to a daughter, Marjorie, with whom Mrs Hanscombe had an emotional meeting through appearing in the programme.

In different circumstances, they might have been her sisters and Mrs Hanscombe said: "When I first met her, she looked so much like her mother it made me cry. I felt as if I was 12 years old again when I saw her walking towards me." Jimmy, she discovered, now lives in Canada.

Long after the war, a twist of fate brought Mrs Hanscombe back to West Norfolk to live. She and her late husband, Jim, were involved in a road accident in which Jim broke his back.

They wanted a bungalow and decided to move from Loughton in Essex, where property prices were too high. "We had friends who lived here and came up to have a look. I fell in love with my bungalow immediately and I will have been here 23 years in March," she said.

Mrs Hanscombe, of Willow Road, South Wootton, works as a volunteer in the café at Lynn's True's Yard Museum, where she was encouraged to tell her evacuee's story. Fellow volunteer Mr Everard Wright put her in touch with the makers of the programme.

Mrs Hanscombe has now grown fond of Hunstanton, despite its unhappy wartime associations. "I hated it then, but now I absolutely love it," she said.