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Jean Edwards, Berkshire

I was born in Coventry on 8 May 1938 which made me 16 months old at the outbreak of the Second World War and seven years old when the war ended on my birthday (VE Day — 8 May 1945).

I’m sure as a child it seemed normal and quite exciting to go to the air-raid shelter in our garden when the sirens started; we used to go to bed in our clothes so that if the sirens did sound we could go to the shelter without delay! I think my earliest memory must be a night in November 1940, the 14th, the night of the Blitz on Coventry. The sirens sounded and the bombs began to fall but we did not have time to get to the shelter, so we hid in the pantry. I was only two-and-a-half years old at the time but remember clearly my mother giving me a blue and white papier-mâché sailor with chocolates inside. I’m sure it took my mind off the bombing! Years later my mother told me she’d hidden the sailor in the pantry for me to have on Christmas morning; she’d probably saved coupons to buy it, but that night the bombing was so bad she didn’t think we would live to see the next day, let alone Christmas, so she gave me the sailor with the chocolates inside.

It is only now as a mother and a grandmother I realize how terrible it must have been for MY mother who had already lived through the First World, war. To me it was just normal, the bombs were always going off and ‘tonight we had chocolate’.

I can still visualize clearly that pantry, the sailor and the chocolates, a rare treat in those days.

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