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This story was contributed to the People's War site by a volunteer from Oxford on behalf of Miss Roberts and has been added to the site with her permission. Miss Roberts fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was 11 years old when my father retired at the normal retirement age of 55 years for his job which was a civil engineer's job in the Colonial Service. I had left primary school by then and since my parents didn't have much money we four girls all went to day schools. These schools, all in Swanage, were all private and because they were in large buildings and because they were at the seaside, the buildings were requisitioned by the Army or Air Force. The schools had to move around, changing all the time.
This happened at my third school. We had a current affairs lesson once a week taken by the Deputy Head Mistress. Each one of us had to produce an item of interest from the news.
I announced that Rangoon had fallen to the Japanese. The whole class said: "I have not heard it!" One of my friends said "Jane's plum is rotten". The Deputy Head said: "Sorry Jane, you must have misheard". But at the end of the day she came to me and apologized personally and said:"I have now heard it myself on the news". This time I was right. But another time I was wrong.
At the same school in the end of term exams we had a general knowledge paper. One of the questions was: what do you know of …? [a then famous politician, a member of the Cabinet whose name I have forgotten]. I confused him with the local radio shop repair man of the same name who was very popular. I wrote in my exam paper that he had been killed by a bomb. The radio shop owner was indeed killed by a bomb in Swanage but not the politician by the same name, who by coincidence also died but from natural causes.

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