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This was when I was five years old at Southmead. Mum would take us to school and have our normal morning classes you had your third of a pine of milk part way through the morning — I think we had to pay a halfpenny or a penny — it wasn’t very expensive. Our great fun of course was the metal cap where you put the straw. We’d have our lunch and then all the little ones — which were about five or six — they had to go back to their classroom had to lie down and have our sleep for an hour, because we had disturbed sleep during the night because of air raids and bombs going off. Every bed had a different animal on and mine was a black cat and you would sleep on that same bed every afternoon. And my brother, when he started school two years later, he had the same black cat! He was allocated that bed and it was sheer coincidence.

Every night we go to bed and the sirens would go off and the wardens would go around and he used to help everybody and because we had quite a large family he’d make sure we got into the Anderson shelter in the back garden. We had, I think two bunks in there, and a couple of chairs and we all had to try and sleep in that.

If we weren’t at home we would be, say in Lawrence Hill, where we had the big brick buildings and we used to have to go there then, which was for more people — they were public shelters.

One night I remember, before we went into the Anderson shelter a bomb fell in the next street to us and it was terrifying. Of course the next morning we went to have a look at it — it had been an horrific explosion but when everyone was talking about and children being children we’d go and have a look at it. We were right near Bristol aerodrome where they made all the planes and there they actually went into the air raid shelters and a lot of them lost their lives and they’re still buried there because they never opened up the shelters afterwards.

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