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"This story was submitted to the People's War site by CSV/´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Nottingham on behalf of Sheila Swinscoewith her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions"

I was 5 when war broke out. I just remember little bits, it was a sort of adventure for children as we didn’t understand the war. Getting up about 3am etc to go to the air raid shelters because the sirens had gone off — dad was away with the Royal Artillery (not abroad) so mother used to get the 3 of us into the shelter. She always kept her clothes on and didn’t get undressed because the sirens went every night. The shelter was at the bottom of the yard, shared by all the people in the street. We’d go in every night, we liked it as we had sing songs. There were benches down one side for kids to go to sleep on but we didn’t want to, we felt safe in there.
When we were at school we used to go round collecting newspapers for salvage of some sort — you used to get a badge depending on how many we’d collected.
In the black outs we couldn’t have windows showing, on top of the door there was a small window that was blacked out with black paint.
We used to have a lot of fun — we didn’t realise the significance of it all.
If the sirens went off while we were at school Mum used to have to come and collect us. I remember mum talking about the laundry on the embankment being bombed, I think she was out, she said she ran home because the children were in school right near the laundry.
I also remember gas masks. My sister was born in 1944 she had one. We used to have to take them to school, someone used to come and test that they had no holes in and replace the bottom filter parts. When my sister was born we had a large gas mask big enough to put a baby inside. You could see through it so you could see the baby, you had to lift the baby in and it had a pump mum had to pump to get air into it, she had it until she could use a Mickey Mouse gas mask which was what they called the ones we had.

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