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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Winnie Edwards and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

At the beginning of the war I was working at Sidcup in Kent as a school teacher. We had a Doodlebug come down on the netball courts which took all the windows out of the school. They had to close the school the next day to clear up all the broken glass.

Our school numbers were very much reduced. We spent a lot of time in the shelters as a result of air raid warnings. As a teacher I was responsible for keeping the children entertained in the shelters and so I always had to have with me – a register, gas masks, and something to occupy the children. We also had gas masks in the classroom.

A girl in my class was killed when her house was bombed. Some days it felt quite sad calling the register when you could never be sure who was going to be there the next day. The class got smaller and smaller as children were evacuated.

I volunteered to go away with an evacuation party. We went to North Wales from September to Christmas of one year. There were two of us teachers and we were given an old disused school to work in which had no electric light. I had the younger age group which consisted of about twenty children.

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