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Why was I not an evacuee? I never asked that question as a five year old, or ever after. My memory for time and sequence of events will be unsure, but the events themselves are etched in my mind.

My father, mother and I lived in Devonport, about a mile from the large naval dockyard, in a collection of four streets, each of about 26 houses. My father was relatively old and also worked for the electrical supply industry, (which was a reserved occupation) so was living at home. However he also was an Air Raid Warden, so was not really at home that often.

Every evening he would arrive home and we would sit down together in silence, because he listened to the news, a habit that has lived with me for seventy years. Then he was gone, and I would go to bed in the shelter. This night-time home was an Anderson shelter, that was buried in our back garden. It being my father’s trade we had electricity etc. in our night time home. I do not remember evenings or nights, so I must have had a clear conscience and slept soundly. I dimly remember mornings as being a repeat of evenings, with my father eating with us, listening to the news, before going to work. I never queried when or where he slept.

Then my world changed, even though there were only four houses in our street with people in at the time. I started school, a short walk to Somerset Place Infants. No recollections, as that lasted for three whole days. I was not an ‘enfant terrible’, no, Hitler had bombed my school. So we went to look, and to be precise he had bombed my classroom, not the remainder of the school, and two nearby houses. So one would imagine that my mother would keep me at home, but no, off we went again on the Friday to Stuart Road, the next nearest school. That was quite a walk, as I had little legs, and the only consolation at being back so soon in education was that they gave me a biscuit with the milk twice a day.

Our house had an extension that served as a kitchen/utility room. This led into a dining room that had a small kitchen range in the fireplace. That was the tradition in older houses, a black fire with an oven and top plates. Everyone else had removed this old feature when gas and electricity became common, but not my father. So we had a daily visit of people who gave my mother a dish to put into the oven. After a certain time she would take it out and then place it in a hay box for collection at tea time.

Each morning waking up, the shelter door was opened and my mother looked to see that there was no damage, then we went into the house. Then one day we opened the door to find a large hole (to me — years later it looked about six inches in diameter), in our slate slab garden path. Father did not come in for breakfast, but that seemed not to bother my mother, and off we went to school. In the evening the story of the previous night’s raid unfolded. There had been a lot of incendiary bombs dropped, and the practice was to climb onto roofs where they were, and cover them with a sandbag to keep the oxygen away, and the return later to remove them into a bucket of sand. That night when we had had the hole, one had landed on our roof, so up went father with a sandbag. But incendiaries came down in strings, so the others removed the ladder and dealt with other bombs. The image of my father sat on top of our three storey house all night swearing at Hitler somehow answers my question of why I was not an evacuee. (I imagine he was swearing, as I do not remember him actually swearing, ever).

It was a lonely life as a child because there seemed to be no other children, or even friends and relatives. Even my brother, who is ten years older than me, was entering the Navy as an artificer, and everyone else was in the services. As well as the children being evacuated, the schools largely went with them. My brother had gone to an emergency High School, and in my time I followed him. When the Secondary School returned to Devonport it took over a wartime hospital just down the road. My life could have been considerably different if education had not been disrupted.

One day my father decided the blitz was over, at least for a while, and we did not need to use the shelter, and I could go out to play. It coincided with summer, and what I learned later to be double summer time. Never having had a watch I ventured forth to the fields and a small quarry that were close by my house. Some time later (much later, as it turned out), I started for home, to meet my father in the centre of the road. It was obvious that there was a problem for me, although nothing was said, as I scuttled by into the house. The next morning my mother told me it was after midnight when I had come home, meaning that they had searched for quite a while. That spell of freedom was very short lived.

Sometimes the house was suddenly full, cousins would appear, having been moved to Devonport in the Services, sometimes coming with their friends. Sometimes the house had total strangers, service people or people that had lost their homes, staying temporarily. I was not allowed out evenings, but there was a brief time between breakfast and being taken to school when I could rush around a few local streets and fields. This was the shrapnel collection, mainly bits of bombs but sometimes pieces of aircraft, particularly when a German bomber was shot down and crashed into some trees less than a mile away.

A friend of my brother had taken home one of the machine guns before the army appeared, but they soon came to collect it. I had some live rifle and machine gun bullets as special prizes, with no idea of the danger, until VE day. That was celebrated by bonfires that lasted for several days, I do not remember any parties, maybe I was still too young. But there were now children of my age in our streets again, and we had no fireworks to celebrate, so the prize bullet collection was one by one thrown in the fire until one exploded such that the bullet went close to one of us. Then some very silly frightened children suddenly knew what a war was, when it was finished.

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