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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Carolyn Bull, a volunteer from Millennium Volunteers, on behalf of Lucy Kathleen Elliott and has been added to the site with her permission. Lucy Kathleen Elliott fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in March 1934 and grew up in Uxbridge, Middlesex. I was given the name Lucy Kathleen Griffiths and I was five and a half when the war broke out. I remember children being evacuated in my area but I wouldn’t leave my mother so I stayed with her. At home we had a ‘Morrison’ shelter, which was for indoor use only and it doubled as a dining table when we ate. But it took up so much room that all the other furniture had to be removed! For some time my father, mother and I slept in this shelter every night because we lived in quite a dangerous area, being close to RAF Northolt and RAF Uxbridge; but when the raids died down and became fewer we started to feel a little safer and began sleeping upstairs in our bedrooms again.
I remember there was a gas holder at the end of the garden, one of three at the Uxbridge Gas Works. One day my mother went outside and found an unlabelled parcel on our doorstep. We had been taught to be very mindful of suspicious packages and had been warned not to open them so she took it to the bottom of the garden and left it there until my father came home to inspect it. Having retrieved it, he finally discovered that it was a food parcel from an American Serviceman he had met whilst on duty. As he said, if it had been a bomb… the whole street would have been blown up!
I also remember my sister Joan Frances being born. She arrived in February 1944 and a few months later, while we were all asleep, there was an air raid and a rocket dropped nearby. The bedroom ceiling came down, the windows were blown in and a crack appeared in the outside wall. When we could get up we went to my baby sister and found her in her crib covered in dust. We were all so lucky not to have been hurt.
Just over a year later the war ended. There was much celebration and despite rationing, families pooled their resources and held a party for all the children. Our road held on out in the street, there was so little traffic as people had to lay up their cars for the duration of the war unless deemed essential users. We were very excited because some of us got to wear fancy dresses made from any available materials and we all had a very happy day!

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