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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Caroline Drodge of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Mary Maund and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was 7 when the war started, living in Sapcote. I went to the village school. The evacuees came and ‘widened our horizons.’ They were mostly from Coventry and Birmingham. Some whole families rented property. There was one French family renting a house in Sapcote, with a girl and a boy. There was a family from Coventry renting a house, also with a girl and a boy. The girls in both families died of diphtheria. My brother and I were vaccinated and were both ill for 8 weeks. We were supposed to have a second dose after 4 weeks, but the doctor would not allow the school to do it. We had the dose at a later date.
My father volunteered for the war, but had a bad stomach and was not taken. There was a factory in Sapcote owned by Toones, which was taken over by W.J. Wild. They made washers at the beginning of the war and my father worked for them. He was the store man. The business expanded and provided more employment. He was in the Home Guard for a while, but had to leave. Part of his store man duties were to work Saturday night looking after the boiler. It meant he could not carry out fire watching duties in the Home Guard.
School was Ok. We had room for extra desks and chairs for the evacuees.
Dad made a shelter for us. He sunk the garden shed into the ground. We went down during air raid warnings, and there were plenty of those.
We glued brown paper strips across the windows of our house so there would be less mess if the windows shattered.
We used to ‘dig for victory’ for the war effort: we grew our own vegetables and felt we were ‘doing our bit’. We took it very seriously. The hardware person came round in a van. At 8 years old I bought a spade for 7 shillings and 6 pence and I’ve still got it. We kept rabbits to eat, but couldn’t eat them so sold them live.
We used everything, there was no waste. We used to have the first milk after the cow had calved, called ‘beastling.’, from the nearby farm. It was very thick and we made it into custard, cooked it in the oven.
The milk came round in containers. We took our jugs out and they had long handled measures to fit inside and draw it out. The milk went off in summer.
We had an ‘outside’ kitchen where we could dry washing over a copper fire.
We had our ‘wireless’ to listen to. It was powered by an ‘accumulator’, a glass container that fitted inside the wireless. It had to be taken to the village to charge up every so often.
When you needed petrol they had to wind the handles on the petrol pumps.
I was 8 or 9 when Merrivale Avenue in Hinckley was bombed. Hinckley was like a foreign land..
I heard of a child going to school in her nightdress. Her house was bombed and everything was lost. At one time the school Head asked us all to take something in for one poor family. We all did, and the family then sold what we’d taken in. People didn’t have much. We struggled to get by, and told jokes as we went along. We had the odd day out and we weren’t miserable. We had homemade, rough cider at hay making time.

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