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This story has been added to the website by Eleanor Fell on behalf of Marjorie Wood, who had given her permission to add her story to the website and understand the terms and conditions.

I was six when the war started, and I was at Whitehawk Primary School in Brighton. We used to have to go from the classroom to the shelters ‘The Trenches’ we called them. We dreaded it, not because we were frighten, but because they were cold and damp and smelly — you couldn’t lean back as the wall were all damp and your clothes would get wet.

We spent lots of time in the shelter, sometimes as much as twice a day! What I hated most was when the sirens went off just before the school bell went at the end of the day. That meant we had to go to the shelter instead of going home. The teachers would sometimes let us draw with pencils and papers rather than doing lessons if that happened.

The worse night was when the Germans bombed St Cuthbert’s Church, where I used to go to Sunday School.. It happened at night and I remember that we were all in the Anderson Shelter in the garden, there were about nine of us in there altogether. We had to hold onto the metal cage that was clipped onto the shelter to stop the walls shaking when the bomb fell on the church.

My father, Edward Watford, was an ARP warden and I know that we used to drive him mad by running out of the shelter so that we could look at the craters left by the bomb. I had seven brothers and they were fond of rummaging through the rubble looking for bullets and shells — another thing my dad wasn’t too pleased about!

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