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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Rachel Irven, a volunteer from Three Counties Action, on behalf of Robert Pryer and has been added to the site with Robert’s permission. Robert fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was about 3 ½ in 1941, when these events happened.
Our family lived in Islington, but my father was in the Royal Artillery and went to train in Exeter to be an anti aircraft gunner. My mother, my elder brother and myself went to Lincolnshire for a while, but then, sadly, in 1941, my father died. He had cancer, a brain tumour (although I did not find this out until 18 years ago when my mother died). We three went down to Exeter to collect his body and took him back to Islington where he was buried. I remember the train had to stop, somewhere near London, as there was an air raid. As my father had not completed his training in Exeter, my mother did not get a full pension — I think they used to call people in her position ‘half-a-crown widows’.
After this we lived in Islington for most of the war. I remember playing on bombsites and picking up pieces of shrapnel (which had rainbow colours on it), although we had been forbidden to do this.
In about 1943, I went to Hanover Street School. A doodlebug hit the British Drug Houses nearby (they used to produce pharmaceutical drugs and possibly munitions there I think) and the school took the blast. When we went to school that day all the windows had been blown out and the furniture was in the street. We had to go to another school, Queens Head Street School, for a while until our school was reopened.
Towards the end of the war, my brother and I went briefly to Neath in South Wales. We were billeted with a family who had wanted to look after 1 girl, not 2 boys and we were not very happy there. My brother managed to get a letter home and mum came to pick us up after only 3 weeks. We found out that she had been sending us parcels of sweets and nice things, but we had never received them!

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