大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Dawn Cunningham of Lutterworth Community College on behalf of Renee O'Connel and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in Essex and was about 15 when the war announcement was made. I remember feeling very frightened when I heard the news because everybody around me was upset. However nothing seemed to happen for a while and my family then moved to London. Just after this I was told that the red sky we could see a long way in the distance from London was actually the bombings in Coventry. Everybody was told to prepare for the worst and my Dad started to dig a pit in the garden to build the air raid shelter which came in bits. He built bunk beds against the wall for my self and my 5 sisters. My dad used to grow marrows over the top of the air raid shelter. Once the beds were made up and the air raid shelter was ready, none of us ever slept in the house again at night, we spent every night in the shelter.

In the day time all the children would play together in the street. They had a long skipping rope that went all the way over the road and everybody played together.
The children all had patches for gardening at school.

My sisters were evacuated to Suffolk at one point. However my family then decided to evacuate themselves to Dunton Basset. By this time we had already lived through the worst of the blitz in London.

I can remember how friendly the American soldiers that came through Dunton Basset were and how nice the Italian POW鈥橲 were to the children.

I married my husband in 1943, he was in the air force.

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