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When the Second World War started, I was the middle child of a family of seven children
(I was 10 ½ years old) . I had sat my preliminary exam and due to sit my final when the war broke out.

On September 3rd, my school class were herded together at Battersea High Street and
taken to Reading (all with our gas masks strung round our necks). When we arrived in
Reading, which seemed such a long way away, we were gathered together in a school and
gradually dispersed into people’s house.

My eldest sister (just 13 yrs old ) and 8 yr old brother went to one house, my other sister
(12 yrs old) and I went to another house and when my other brother reached six went to a third house. My eldest brother, who was a pupil at Battersea Grammar School was sent to Worthing. My youngest brother who was 1 yr old stayed at home with my father and mother.

I had to sit my preliminary exam again (because the records were lost) which I passed and then sat my final exam, which I also passed. Unfortunately there were only two passes at our school that year, and only one Secondary school place available. My best friend, who was an Indian girl (the only black pupil in our school at that time) was chosen to take the place as the Headmistress thought she would benefit more from this new school. As it happens three months after she left our school her father, a doctor, took her out of there and sent her to a private school. In the meantime, I was offered a place at a Technical College, which was no good for me as I wanted to be a Secretary, only Hairdressing, Dressmaking, Tailoring, etc., were taught there.

I stayed in five different homes in Reading during the three and a half years I was there.
At Easter 1943 my father came down to Reading to take me home (the second time I had seen my father in 3 ½ years). He had arranged for me to be interviewed for a job, which I got at Price’s Patent Candle Company, in an office, where one of the jobs I had was allocating Candles to different shops all over the country using Ration Cards. I bet not many people knew that Candles were rationed during the war.

In 1944 I was at the Company’s playing fields watching a cricket match when a doodlebug came over and the engine cut out. Someone shouted lay down flat and as the doodlebug headed towards us in the field, it suddenly veered away to a block of flats, which unfortunately it hit.

When my eldest brother left school, he became a school teacher at 20 years of age at a private school and later went to King’s College in the Strand to study theology and later became a Vicar. The reason I mention this is because he married his 3 sisters and 3 brothers, I shouldn’t think that happens very often.

My war memories ……Edna Gray (Mrs)

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