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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Christine Wadsworth of Wakefield Libraries and Information Services on behalf of Richard Brown and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions

My name is Richard Brown I’m 73, I’m speaking from Horbury, but I've only moved up here in the last 3 months. I lived for 32 years in Wokingham and we’ve just moved up.

At 7 years of age I was in Islington, North London and I was the youngest of nine children. Three of us were evacuated, myself, my next brother older than me, and the sister older than him. We were evacuated to Cambridge, it was September ‘39, and it was very difficult getting three people to stay in one house. We were herded round all the places there being no room here, no room there, eventually we were the last three, but we still couldn’t go together, my sister went on one side of the road, 38 Cyprus Road, Cambridge, and my brother and I went elsewhere. At 7 years old I don’t remember a great deal about it. I do remember the outside loo, but I’m told that we were not treated very well and that eventually in July of 1940 we were taken back home to Islington.

While we were in Cambridge we went to visit the people’s relatives, they were in Royston and had their loo down the end of the garden, and the bucket. I think my harshest memory, I remember very little of it, but the thick newspaper being used in the toilet and tearing up the newspaper down the bottom and putting the newspaper on a nail in this wooden hut down there which stank terribly. So that was that.

We came back in the July of 1940, of course just at the beginning of the air raids in London and we lived in Packington Street, Islington,which is about 1 ½ miles from the City. Subsequently, after the War when I started work, I used to walk to the City to work, we lived that close. We had an Anderson Shelter and we went down into the shelter every night. I slipped down in the shelter one night on the iron railings - I still have a scar on my leg to this day - and we went out every night. School was interrupted of course, half-day school. Very little sleep was had, the air raids went on every night. Then we went somewhere else to stay in, not in an Anderson Shelter in the garden, but we went somewhere else for a while. Every night we walked up there with our blankets and went underground. It wasn’t an underground station, we went in a building which was underground. I suppose really it was the worst possible thing to do as the lot could have come in on us and as we walked home every morning after the siren all the houses were bombed ,but our house remained up but the windows were broken every day until they were boarded up.
Friends were lost and I had another brother 15 years of age who went out most evenings down to where the bombs were falling in the City and he had great fun, so it was really an enjoyable time as a 15 year old going down to the City where all the bombs were, clearing up rubble, helping the firemen. He would come home and say he’d had a marvellous time, so you wonder what 15 year olds do now or what can entertain them - he was a 15 year old being entertained by bombs!

It really was noisy, the City of London when it burnt it really did flame. They were on top of us. We could hear bombs dropping and then you felt them coming closer and closer as the salvo fell and you wondered underneath if the next one was going to get you, but it wasn’t us in fact of nine children in the family, four or five of them were in the Services. By the time the War was over, that 15 year old was in the Navy doing Murmanz runs and my sister was in the ATS, so no one was actually killed, the family actually existed there.

I shopped for my mother with the ration books and I remember there was always talk of the Black Market, you could always get things. We didn’t have sugar, so we swapped sugar for butter, someone down the road wanted so much sugar and we didn't have sugar we had butter, so we swapped all our sugar coupons or butter or sugar for butter. Even now when I eat butter I probably subconsciously still think of how precious this was during the War.

The brothers and sisters they had families, they had friends who were in the Services and there always seemed to be masses of people in our house, with nine children, they always had boyfriends and girlfriends and the girlfriends had boyfriends in the Services and they were coming home, they always managed to bring home a little bit of something to my mother, a joint of beef or something like that, there was always something going on.

It wasn’t such a terrible time, it was just living, we didn’t know whether it was bad or wrong or anything else, we lived through the War, we were very dependent upon listening to Churchill round the radio, his speeches were absolutely inspirational at the time we were really drawn upon and they lifted us as did the wonderful fighter spitfires. There really was a tremendous feeling, we never really thought, we just couldn’t think, we would ever lose the War.

We all came through it unscathed, brothers and sisters who were in the ATS and in the War in India and in Burma, they all came home fortunately, so we were some of the lucky ones.

These are the reminiscencess of Richard Brown now living in Lupset Park, Wakefield, but who spent the war years as an evacuee in Cambridge from September to July then went back to Islington for the time during the bombing, then we were evacuated again after the September, so we’d seen all the rough stuff in Islington. I lived in Packington Street in Islington at the time. Islington London that is.

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