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I was 2 years old, living in Southgate, North London 1939. My father was already ‘called up’ in the Territorial Army preparing the possible war.

Obviously wartime activities dominate my early memories. The blackout on windows and the dim lights; the huge indoor shelter which dominated the dining room and where we all slept — an elderly granddad, my mother, me the dog and my doll, sometimes a nervous neighbour and my father on a rare spell of leave before a change of duty. On his embarkation leave before being sent abroad I had chicken pox and he caught it and was too poorly to leave with his unit, so he missed his posting and eventually went to Portland in Dorset*. Hew as in ‘Ack Ack’ (Anti Aircraft) and his unit’s task was to hep guard the all important harbour usually full of ships. I was not evacuated and I remember we went to visit him at the end of the war, and seeing all the barbed wire on the beaches so I couldn’t go near the sea, but there were loads of American soldiers who threw candy sweets from their huge Army trucks. A great treat for a little London girl!

A home my mother was in the SVS and went round the district with a friend collecting pig food into a little trailer behind the car. People left their kitchen waste out to fee the farm animals. Once a week the WVS held a clothing exchange and sometimes parcels of new clothes arrived from America. Oh joy, I had a beautiful blue dress with white collar and cuffs which I adored. Food parcels came from Australia too, with tins of meat, and fruit and sponge puddings. We children became penfriends with the Aussie children and I am still in contact with mine! (In fact, at last 60 years later she came to England recently and we walked the sights of London together over the VE weekend. She couldn’t believe her long held dreams of doing it were coming true).

Southgate was not ‘blitzed’ though we had many air raids. Once we were walking home with my ‘new’ (third hand!) birthday bike when the whine of a V.bomb could be heard. My mother put us both down on the pavement under the bike and we waited as the noise stopped and then heard the tremendous bang when the bomb dropped (about a mile away). We thought it might have hit my grandparents road but it was a few small streets away. There had been no warning siren — it was a wayward bomb, meant for central London.

At times we travelled on the underground tube trains and saw al the bunk beds in the stations where people slept at night, or sheltered during the air raids and at school we often had to take our books and work in the dug-out shelters in the playing fields and then wait for the ‘all clear’ before we could go home!

One day my mother was given a large piece of parachute! She lined a coat she made for me (from an old one) with it. It was very silky! I don’t know where the parachute had been found………..

For parties my mother made me a skirt from black-out material and trimmed it with coloured bias binding. I though it was lovely! The biggest party of all was for VE Day when my mother played a piano that had been pushed out on the street and we all danced and sang and played games and had a wonderful time.

* It may be interesting to note that my husband was a young teenager living in Dorset. His WW2 memories are all linked with seeing the warships and the ‘little boats’ for D-Day and the army aircraft crossing from sea to land on their way inland. He and his brother cycled off to see one that had been shot down on the hills behind their village — no air raid warnings put them off.

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