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"This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jean Brown and has been added to the website on behalf of Mrs Barbara Wilbraham née Turner with her permission and
she fully understands the site's terms and conditions".

On 3rd September 1939 I was in a hall in Robertsbridge, Sussex, listening to the wireless and Neville Chamberlain PM telling us that war had been declared on Germany.

I was 7½ years old; my brother was 12 and my sister 2. With my mother we had said goodbye to our father that morning and become evacuees under a government scheme. We had no idea where we were going.

Later that day we arrived in Northiam. My mother and sister were billeted with a spinster lady, Miss Ballard, in her cottage. This was lit by oil lamps with the toilet at the end of the garden.

My brother and I were billeted on Farrant Farm. Each morning we were given a basket and told to find the new laid eggs in the haystack. Some were still warm when we picked them up. I can remember the smell of the pigswill and the noise the pigs made when they were fed.

The pavements on the way to school were thick with fallen autumn leaves and we had great fun walking through these and kicking them up. If we met the Vicar on our walk the girls had to courtesy and say, "Good morning rector".

The village school was unable to cope with this invasion of children from London, and the mothers couldn't settle in the country, so everyone had gone home to Deptford by Christmas 1939 …

Having survived the Blitz by sleeping in the Anderson shelter in the garden every night, to the accompaniment of guns and exploding bombs, my next memory happened on 20th January 1943 when I was 10 and a pupil at Deptford Park School in Evelyn Street, Deptford.

It was lunchtime and we had just finished eating our school dinner. There was an enormous explosion and the blast swept through the ground floor hall. After a moment of silence the cook came screaming out of the kitchen into the hall.

There had been no air raid warning. A German plane had come out of the clouds and dropped a high explosive bomb, which had destroyed the Chichester Public House next door to the school. The school caretaker was killed.

My father was working in Charlton and heard that the school had received a direct hit. When he arrived at my school in mid-afternoon he was allowed to take me home.

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