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This story was added to the People's War site by Stella Webb with help from Endellion Sharpe. The author is aware of the site's Terms and Conditions.

“My tenth birthday was two days after the war broke out. Visiting neighbours who were digging a trench in their garden as a shelter, and hearing the air raid sirens, really brought it home to me.

To begin with we continued living in Coulsdon, from where my father travelled up to the City every day to the bank where he worked.

At the end of August 1940, my parents, my two younger sisters and I went on holiday to Herefordshire. The countryside was so peaceful and calm after the noise of London that my parents decided to move the family there. We stayed for two years; my father joining us in the country when he could take time off from his work and his fire-watching duties in the City of London. My baby brother was born in Herefordshire — my parents doted on him as the only boy in the family, able to carry on the family name.

That first winter was very cold, and I remember walking with difficulty to school through thick snowdrifts.

My schooling was very disrupted because of the war. I had gone from Croydon High School to the village school in Whitchurch, full of evacuees from Birmingham, and then on to Ross Grammar school. When we returned to Croydon in 1943 I went to Purley Girls’ Grammar School. Long before the days of the National Curriculum, what you were taught in different schools could vary, and not follow on at all from what you had learned somewhere else. I was to attend yet two more schools before leaving at eighteen.

In the summer of 1943 we returned to Herefordshire because the doodlebug raids were upsetting everyone, especially my baby brother. Very sadly he died from meningitis just a few months afterwards. My mother really never recovered from the pain and distress of losing her little son. She became very moody, and having been a regular churchgoer she completely lost her faith.

This took its toll on me, and I was desperate to leave school and start my own life. My parents’ plans for me — university, the civil service — were quite opposite to my wishes. I wanted to join the Land Army, and meet people from different walks of life from what I was used to. In the end, some years after the end of the war, I trained as a teacher — at Bletchley Park!

All these difficulties in my young life, many of them caused by the war, changed and developed my character, toughened me up and strengthened my Christian faith.

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