大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site Katherine Campbell from WW2 Team on behalf of Pamela Cabannes and has been added to the site with his / her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I had a gasmask during the war - I was four. Mine was a Mickey Mouse mask and I can remember it so plainly. It was red and it had a big nose. When you breathed, it vibrated and wiggled up and down. My twin sisters were born at the beginning of the war. We had two bassinetts you used to put the babies inside and zip them up - that was their gas mask. We had two of these, they were huge!

We had an incendiary bomb fall on the house which set fire to the roof. My father went up there and put it out. He worked in the docks, so as this was a reserved occupation. He worked for the Navy, and was going backwards and forwards to the docks with supplies for the Navy and Merchant Navy.

We had an Anderson Shelter in the garden and we all had bunks in there. We went right down the garden when the siren went. One night, we woke up and we'd all been bitten as there was an ants' nest in the Shelter. That was the last time we slept down there - we took all the beds and from then on, slept in the celler.

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