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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Matthew Smaldon on behalf of Sheila Tremaine and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Tremaine fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

We moved to Reading at the start of the war, as my father was transferred to Fry's from Bristol. We lived in a flat at Victoria Square (where the technical college now stands) on King Street.

I remember that it was instilled in us at school 'If you hear a siren when you are outside, run indoors'. I was 7, and was walking home from St Joseph’s Convent School (which is on Upper Redlands Road) when the siren went. I remember my feeling of terror. I was half a mile from home, and I ran and ran and ran. The sirens generated a real feeling of fear.

When the siren went at school, at first we had to go down into the cellar. We used to see nuns down there. I thought they must live there, as I never saw them anywhere else!

In 1941 or 42, I was at home, getting over measles. I was in my mother’s bed, and she was looking out the window, towards the gasworks behind our flat. She suddenly turned and said 'Sheila - get under the bed! Get under the bed!' A lone German raider came down and machine gunned the gas works. Luckily there wasn't an explosion. There was a brick shelter out in the square, but for some reason we never went in there. After the first raid we always went into the basement flat.

I remember the American soldiers in Reading. Mother said 'Do not speak to the Americans', but I remember them offering us sweets, and being friendly. My father was by now in the RAF, posted to Washington DC, at the Allied RAF Mission. He made a lot of American friends and he wrote to my mother that some of his friends were coming. There were three of them - Colonel Grayswayne, a rather stout lady (I think she was called Vera), and another man. Mother took them all to Oxford for the day, and I've still got a photo of us.

I can remember sitting at a long sash window on the first floor of our flat in the early evening, looking up at the sky, filled with black silhouettes. This would have been in 1944 - they were bombers on their way to Germany. They made a deep, dull throbbing noise as they passed over. They were flying low, not like these days, so they were very loud. I used to watch them every night. Mother sometimes used to watch them as they came back - those that did.

The square where we lived was a microcosm of life — all the people who lived there had come to Reading from somewhere else, because of the war. We wouldn’t have been living together were it not for the war. On the first floor of our building were the Forsyths who were a rather posh family. My friend, who lived two or three doors down, had an older brother, George, who was always in trouble. One day George climbed up the drainpipe to peer into the window of one of the Forsyth daughters — there was a scandal because of that!

One evening, my mother and I returned home from the Granby cinema at Cemetery Junction, when we saw someone on the landing. They were trying to steal our blackout curtain. It was a blanket, so I suppose it was quite useful.

We ended up having a German prisoner of war working in our school garden. I remember he was called Hans, and was very dark skinned, with dark hair. I can also remember the smell of boiled cabbages for lunch at school — horrible!

In the evening of the day the Germans surrendered, we walked up to Broad Street. When we got there, all the shop windows were alight. I'd never seen lights like that before — it was just magic, like fairyland. My life had been all blackouts and ‘Put out that light!’

I have one other memory of that time. My father was, at one time, based at RAF Cranwell. While he was there he made friends with a number of Polish airmen. He struck up a close relationship with one in particular, Vladek Cieskelski. I have the letter he wrote to me, dated 1941. In it he said he was a friend of my Daddy, and that he had come to England to help win the war. He described his own children, who were in Warsaw, and how much he missed them. It was very moving — not the sort of letter you would expect a man to write to a child. It was a deeply felt, emotional letter. I think, because he couldn’t contact his own children, he was writing to another little girl instead. I’ve still got a book of Polish fairytales he sent to me.

The letter has been given to the RAF Museum in Hendon, who confirmed that he survived the war. I never knew if he went back to find his wife and children — the last thing he heard about them was that she was working as an interpreter in Warsaw.

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