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Living in Lincolnshire we had a lot of Royal Air Force stations around us and in South Lincolnshire we had both fighter and bomber stations. The fighters were for defending ourselves if the German bombers came over (and they did) and the bomber stations were for our bomber aircraft going over to bomb the Germans.

We were as a family proud to learn that my uncle took part in the first raid on Germany. When the Germans started to bomb the big cities all the children from these cities were sent ‘evacuated’ to places like Lincolnshire because we didn’t have so many air raids.

We didn’t have evacuees at our house but my auntie Anne had firstly two boys from Nottingham and later two girls from London — so that everyone could go to school, local children went in the mornings and the evacuees in the afternoons.

We didn’t have air raids everyday and night but most nights and occasional days we did. At night our parents would wake us up and we had to go to the shelters and during the daytime if there was as air raid we had to go to the school shelters. We also had to practice with our gas masks — and so the war went on almost as a ‘phoney’ war until the Germans marched into Holland, Belgium and France. The Germans fought their way right across France to the coast of the English Channel.

The British Soldiers were on the Beaches of Northern France with nowhere to go. The Government asked anyone who had a small motorboat or cabin cruiser to sail across the channel to bring the soldiers home — the German aircraft were machine gunning the soldiers on the beach — and then a miracle happened — a great sea mist (or fog) came down and so the Germans couldn’t see our soldiers and many many thousands were able to get home to England. This happened on or about my 11th birthday and so a lot had happened in a year.

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