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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Age Concern, Dorchester on behalf of Miss Valerie Tett and has been added to the site with her permission. Miss Tett fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was 4 at the beginning of the war and I was living with my parents at Hinchley Wood near Hampton Court in Surrey. My father was in the First World War and was only in the Home Guard during the Second World War, I think because he worked for a bank so was in a reserve occupation. We kept having air raids and sirens going. We weren’t very far from the railway line that went up to London. The air raids seemed to happen every night at more or less the same time. We found out that there was a spy signalling to the German planes from the railway line. He was caught.

At the beginning of the war, I was evacuated down to Devon with my mother for about 3 months because the bombing did get terrible. We went to Coombe Martin near Ilfracombe. Then things got a bit better so we went back to Hinchley Wood. It got bad again and mother and I went to Sidmouth, Devon. When we went back home I went to a school in Thames Ditton. The sirens were going and we all had to rush to the shelters. I was frightened. At home we sheltered in the hall and my father put a large rug over the glass in the front door in case it got shattered.

When I was 6 we went by bus to see an aunt and uncle at Capel near Dorking, Surrey. As we arrived at Capel there was an air raid. When we got off the bus a German plane had come down next door to my aunt and uncle’s bungalow. We saw the German pilot, who had baled out, running towards the bungalow trying to warn people that all his ammunition would explode. He was taken away by police car. All the ammunition in the German plane was exploding as we arrived, so mother and I had to crawl on all fours to the front door. The fire brigade was there. [The plane was a Junkers 88. The engine was dug out of the field, restored and is now in the Canada War Museum in Ottawa].

One day when I had a day off from school because the older children were taking exams, my mother stayed at home to look after me. We heard a strange noise coming from the garden. We went out to see what it was and saw people all lined up looking over our fence. There was a huge crater with a bomb, perhaps 2 feet across, in it. My mother telephoned the bomb disposal people and all the streets round about were evacuated. I was absolutely terrified. All my dollies and my teddy were left behind. We all had to go to a huge hall by the station until the bomb was defused.

I had to go up to London to an eye hospital. We travelled on the underground to and from Waterloo. People were coming down into the underground station with their babies, small children and their flasks and they were sitting down for the night.

We moved to Byfleet, Surrey when I was 8. There were flying bombs. One dropped on a house on our road. All the people in the house were killed including the girl who used to look after me when my mother was fire-watching and my father was at the Home Guard. One day when I was going up to London by train with my parents, a doodlebug with flames coming out at the back was travelling parallel with the train. Then it went down and we couldn’t see it any more. I often saw doodlebugs at night when we were at Byfleet. Suddenly they would drop and I knew that somebody was probably going to get killed.
My grandfather worked at Teddington at the Physical Laboratory. He helped Barnes Wallis with the testing of the bouncing bomb.

We moved house again on 8 May 1945 and didn’t know what all the preparations were on the village green. Then we put the wireless on and heard that the war had finished — so we stopped unpacking and mother, father and I went out to join in the celebrations on the village green.

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