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I lived in London during the war, and even though I was very young, having only been born in 1940, one thing I can remember vividly, even today, is the sound of the warning sirens signalling another bombing raid. During the Blitz, I can recall the sirens going off almost everyday and it was an awful sound, really frightening. When it went off, often in the middle of the night when I was tucked up in bed, my mum would put me in my gasmask and we would hurriedly make our way to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of our garden. Sometimes, if we had time, we would go to the bottom of our street and hide in the arches with other families because it was safer than the Anderson shelter. Sometimes we would sit there for hours waiting for the all-clear, signalled by another siren of a different sound, and although the waiting was boring and often frightening, with the constant noise of aeroplanes zooming overhead and the occasional crash as another building topples to the ground, you had to make the most of it and I tried not to complain. Although we were lucky because none of the houses in our street were bombed badly during the whole of the war, many buildings were completely shattered and evidence of the raids was everywhere. When I think about it, everyone who lived in London during these years must have lost at least one relative to the bombing, and we were no different. Sometime during the war, my mum’s aunt was making her way home from a mornings shopping when she was caught by a sudden bombing attack and literally blown apart. They had to scrape her off the pavement like jelly and put her in a bag — well there were so many deaths, it was all they could do. While today, this would make headline news, for us it had become part of daily life.
I was too young to be evacuated, but both my older brother and sister were sent to Cornwall for most of the war. My dad was blind in one eye, so wasn’t allowed to fight on the front lines, but he did do his part for the war effort by becoming a chef on the ships, and so he was often away for long periods of time.
With our family separated and bombs being dropped on our heads left, right and centre, times were hard. Rationing made things even harder and there was never anything much to eat, although because I was born during the war I never really knew any different. It was so tight that buying Christmas presents was almost impossible and on Christmas Eve my mum would sit up all night making clothes for my doll whilst my dad would construct a crib from old bits of wood that he’d saved up during the year. These handmade gifts, together with a tangerine in a stocking and a Threepenny Joey, were my Christmas presents, and although it might not seem like much of a present now, it was plenty for me.
People assume that once the war was over everything just returned to normal but that is far from the truth. Rationing continued for the next few years and it took even longer to rebuild all the damage that the bombs had done to homes, schools, hospitals and other buildings all across London. In fact I believe that there are some places in London that still haven’t been rebuilt and the war has been over for sixty years! On a couple of occasions just after the war, everyone in my class received a package from the Americans. It was a little food box containing things that we still found hard to buy, such as suet and spam, and I remember being really pleased with it. Our teacher told us that it was a thank you from the Americans and it certainly put a smile on my young face!

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