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Each time the air raid warning sounded we took our eiderdowns and slept under the stairs. We watched from the landing window as the night sky was lit up by fires following bombing. As for everyone, each evening my mother put up the blackout. We had to visit a dug out, lined with sand bags which were at the top of entry hill to have our gas masks tested. Mine was a Mickey Mouse one as I was very young. We had a pig bin up the road for potato peelings etc. It was very often seething with maggots which as children we were obliged to look at!! There was a large American camp at Southstoke, convoys of jeeps containing military personnel would frequently travel up the Wellsway to the camp. Eventually, we were provided with an Anderson shelter which we had indoors. It was just like being in a cage when we slept in it. During the day we used the top as a table. My mother used to slit open envelopes so that we could draw on the back as paper was so scarce. We also drew in the back of bills. We had two families as evacuees. A mother and two children arrived following the Bath blitz and later on another mother came with her two children. We divided our house — which was not large, including the pantry shelves. We crammed into our own space. My father, together with thousands of other soldiers of course, was away throughout the war. We did not know where he was. I can only remember him coming home twice for a couple of days. We wrote to him often and sent pictures which I discovered many years later he kept. I still have some of them. My infant school was close to the railway and the trains were frequently filled with American soldiers. They threw chewing gum to us in the playground as the passed. I can remember my aunt coming to visit us from London. The trains were so full that she had to travel in the guards van. My aunt in Australia sent us food parcels several times containing sultanas, raising, sugar etc. Including a red jelly which I can see to this day! As a child, my overwhelming fear was that the enemy would snatch my mother from us and that like my father, she would disappear. For years after the war we passed through bombed sites in the way to school in the summer they were always full of buddleia shrubs which were covered with butterflies.

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