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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Matthew Smaldon on behalf of Joan Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Smith fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

'I was evacuated from Islington in 1940. I was 12 years old, and all my school (Hannover St School) were taken to Paddington train station. The journey was very long, and we were thinking ‘Are we ever going to get there?’. We didn’t know our destination, and our parents in London didn’t know either. They only found out when we wrote to them later.

Eventually we arrived in Taunton, in Somerset. We were taken to a village called Spaxton, and had to stand in the village hall while people from the village came to pick out who they wanted to look after. It was awful to have to be picked out like that. My sister and I were left at the end — no one wanted two girls. But a nice couple, Mr and Mrs Saunders, did take us in, and we stayed in their 3 bedroom house, with their two children — we got on very well with them. We didn’t go to the village school, as there was no room for all the evacuees as well. So we worked on the farm, corn cutting, milking cows, all sorts of things. It was a bit of a surprise, as I hadn’t been to the country much before then, but I loved it there. I went back to the village a few years ago — it hadn’t changed at all. There were no extra houses or anything. I met the Saunders’ two children — they still live in the village.

In 1942 I was called back to London. I was 14, and they wanted me to work in a factory in Islington, making fireman’s uniforms. It was in a factory in Rosebury Avenue, Clerkenwell. My Mum was still in Somerset (she came down to be with me and my sister), so I was living with my Dad, who had been called up to be a policeman. Going back was horrific. There were no fields, and I missed this. And there was bombing, and the doodlebugs. When my sister came back she was very unhappy living in London after our time in Somerset.

Every time a doodlebug came over we had to run down to the shelter at the factory — it kept you fit though! Doodlebugs landed close to us, so you would go home wondering if the house was there or not. We would see the doodlebugs, as they were quite low, with a flame coming out of the back. The engine would stop, the flame would go out, and you knew you had a few minutes before the explosion. You just held your breath, and hoped for the best. It was quite nerve-wracking.

There were lots of bombsites around Islington. It was quite horrendous to see it. My Dad would be out at night, as a policeman, and he would worry about me. But I slept through a lot — as a teenager you just got on with it. I used to go to the pictures with my friend. It would say ‘Warning’ across the screen when the bombing was about to start, and we’d hear the guns. At the end it would say ‘All Clear’. We would stay in the cinema when the bombing was going on, watching the film.
We just thought ‘If it happened, it happened’.'

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