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War was declared just before my 10th birthday and at the time we were living in Newbury Park near Ilford, Essex, on the north-eastern outskirts of London. We had not long returned from spending three years in Southampton, and while there well before the war I can remember someone coming to our house to fit my parents and myself with gasmasks. Also there was a barrage balloon on show on the Common. It’s strange that once war started we had to carry gasmasks with us all the time, but I have no memories of having to put mine on at school for practice, or at any other time, though I can well remember the rubbery smell and holding a card to the front to check that it was airtight, and I had a lovely silvery case.

I was evacuated to Ipswich in the general exodus of children from London before the war started. I cannot remember saying goodbye to my parents or anything about the journey, but on arrival we all had to sit on the floor in a school hall waiting to be claimed. Children had been allocated beforehand, and gradually the hall emptied, but I was one of the last and it felt very lonely sitting there waiting. I was billeted on a young couple who were very kind, but there was no school, and no contact with anyone I knew, apart from a meeting in a park arranged one afternoon with two children who lived next door to me at home. I was introduced to a group of children who lived nearby on the new housing estate, who were friendly, and we played in a garage making up plays. I used to cry in bed at night, but was very self-conscious, and would stop when I heard someone downstairs open the door to listen. I just didn’t want to get up in the morning and stayed there reading Coral Island, having to be called several times. On the 3rd September we all listened to Neville Chamberlain on the wireless telling us that war had been declared, and this was followed by the siren, but it was a false alarm. Our neighbour had a small white concrete patch about a yard square in his front garden, and he covered it in sand so that it couldn’t be seen by German bombers overhead! My parents came to visit one weekend and it was horrible having to say goodbye again, but Mum left her cardigan which was a comfort. I only stayed there for about a fortnight. Nobody had known beforehand where the children were being sent and my parents thought that Ipswich would probably be more dangerous than our house on the outskirts of London, so I was brought home again.

For a time the local Junior School was shut, and I was in a small group of children who met up in a neighbour’s house for makeshift lessons by parents for a few hours a day. Eventually school reopened, and I can remember taking the Scholarship exam, which was quite daunting, as we had to be taken by bus to a strange school to sit the exam, which I passed.

As a result, in 1940 I joined the Ilford County High School for Girls, and so in June went with a small group to join them in Wales — not knowing anybody at the school. We were billeted for a week in Wiltshire on the way, before arriving in Aberdare, where I was billeted with a miner’s family, together with a new friend called Pat. I felt very homesick and the mountains surrounding us seemed a real barrier from home, but I did enjoy climbing up to pick bilberries. We shared the Aberdare school, having lessons in the afternoons. My parents visited one weekend and we went for a picnic on one of the mountains, when a lone German bomber flew over and dropped a little bomb on the hillside opposite.

At home the Ilford CHS building at Gants Hill was reopened to accommodate all the girls from any of the local schools who had not been evacuated, so after about a month in Aberdare I came home again, for most of the rest of the war. I used to cycle about two miles to school. There were no proper shelters in the school, but the brick arches of the corridors round the two quadrangles were filled with sandbags and during air-raids we sat on old bus seats and carried on with lessons on a blackboard. We only went there when the danger seemed imminent. Most of the time school carried on normally and I can only remember one occasion when our head-mistress, Miss Bull, at Assembly, had to announce the death of a little girl, in the First Year, who had lived in Dagenham, one of the badly hit areas in the blitz. I never learnt to cook, as the Domestic Science laboratory was shut throughout the war, and at home I was only allowed to do things like shelling peas for fear of wasting food. At lunch we were not allowed to leave anything on our plates, and I can remember on one occasion being watched by the whole rounders team, anxious to get off for an away match, as I struggled to swallow the last mouthfuls of a very stodgy suet pudding. We had home and away netball, rounders, tennis and hockey matches with nearby schools, but of course there were no school trips. I did learn German, which could have come in very useful! There were twenty-two girls in my class and five of us were called Barbara.

We were supposed to have four colours of gingham check material for our school summer uniform, according to which House we were in — blue, red, green or yellow — but this became impossible to obtain, so during one needlework class the teacher gave my friend and me, who were quite good at dressmaking, some pattern books and told us to choose three patterns. These then became the new school uniform, to be made up in any material, and I can still remember the patterns and materials I used for mine. Our tunics had to be a standard length, 4 inches above the knee when kneeling, and I hated them being so short. It was lovely later on when I could wear the New Look.

I was lucky that by the time I had to take the Matriculation exam the war had just ended, so I did not have the interruptions experienced by those taking it the year before, of filing out of the unprotected hall in silence to the corridors when the raids became intense and trying to carry on there. I can remember the previous year thinking how difficult it must be for them.

At one time we happened to be sitting in the corridor when the V2 rockets were falling, and of course there could be no warning as they travelled faster than sound, the first thing being the explosion, very strangely followed by the roar of the arrival receding into the distance. One fell so close we felt the blast strongly.

Just before the end of the war I was spending Christmas in Cornwall with my previous next-door neighbours and my parents arranged for me to stay on there to avoid all the V1s and V2s, so I went to the Penzance school for the Spring term of 1945. Then I returned home to my normal school before VE Day.

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