大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War Site by Jane Cave for Three Counties Action on behalf of Helen Hodges and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My memory starts in 1938, a year before the outbreak of war, when I was just 7. My sister's school had an exchange with a school in Hamburg. We had a German girl to stay with us for a month and then my sister went to Hamburg with other girls from her class for a month. While she was away I overheard my Father saying how worried he was that there was going to be a war with Germany and Margaret would be stuck there. This was just before the Munich crisis and I was very scared.

The next scary thing I remember was one day when I was out in the garden I looked back through the drawing room window to see all my family wearing gas masks. My mother called me but I ran away into the sunken garden and crept into a small opening and remained hidden and heard my Mother say to a man "leave me a small gas mask and I will try and fit in on later. She is obviously very frightened". Gas masks were horrid.

I was incredibly frightened of Hitler and wished that he was dead. Each day when I went to school I was afraid that he was chasing me so I ran as hard as I could, almost collapsing in a heap when I got to the "safety" of the playground.

Living in Wakefield we were lucky not to get any real bombing, but we had a great many sirens during the night when the bombers came over to bomb either Sheffield or Manchester. The planes would drone with a deep noise when they were laden with bombs but had quite a high note when they came back without their loads. We had a little knitted jug hanging up and my Mother would put a penny in for the Red Cross whenever we had a "quiet" night. She used to say that it was the best penny she ever spent! When the air raid siren went we all went into the cellar, except my father who was an air raid warden and had to check that people were alright. It was horrid getting out of a warm bed and going into a cold, damp cellar. To help with this we had "siren suits" which we wore over our pyjamas. They were trousers, tops and pixie hoods all in one with a zip up the front. We also had an electric fire in the cellar with its flex going through the dining room floor and plugged into a socket there. This meant we could make toast when we were hungry.

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