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This contribution was submitted by Mike Urry to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with his permission.

I was helping my father dig up the front garden on the day war was declared. It was a beautiful day and it was the time of year to get rid of some of the early plants. But one thing stuck in my mind….it was the first time I ever saw a lady wearing trousers and that was the ARP, lovely long hair and a lovely new uniform with trousers. And nobody was interested in the war … all my male friends were interested in — because it was unusual, it was almost unknown, was a lady with trousers.

As kids we were free, compared with today’s children we were at liberty. We had a lot of Americans and Canadians near us…but there was no fear of being molested or anything like that. Apart from being bombed or whatever we lived a completely carefree, wild life. Looking back that’s something that the present day children will never know about. The worst bit was not having a father for my most formative years. We didn’t see him for six years. He was in the Air Force. He was involved in radar. He was in the 1941 invasion of North Africa and from there he went to Italy, Sicily, South of France…ended up in a military hospital for two years and then we joined him in South Africa in 1947 — not having a father. And now regretting not writing to him as often as I should.

To me the heroes of the last war were the mums. The mothers, who had husbands away at the war, perhaps alive, perhaps dead. They didn’t see them or know what they were doing, in our case for months on end. They had all the worries of rationing, making ends meet, because the money was very much reduced, because of service pay etc. And not passing on that fear, those worries, to us kids.

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