´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Rebecca Hood of the People's War Team in Wales on behalf of Gillian Jones and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The story was gathered at an event held in Abergavenny to mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day.

I remember the evacuee who came to stay with us Wendy Shalt from Middlesex, she was about 10 and I was seven. A knock came to the front door, and my father answered the front door and he was asked if he would like to take an evacuee …he really wanted a boy to stay with us. Well we only had two bedrooms…and Wendy came…and she stayed with us a year. We shared a bed, a three-quarter sized bed in the second bedroom — she came to school with me and settled into the family. And I remember when we eventually met her mother and father her mother broke into lots of tears when they had a letter from Wendy saying that she was safe with a family in Wales. It was quite a happy time….we got on very well. It was like having a sister because I was an only child.

When the sirens came along we would huddle under the stairs… my father had put a deckchair that my mother used to sit in and I would sit on my mothers lap and we also had some small stools to sit on…but the lady two doors down from us…she had an air raid shelter in the bottom of her garden. I can’t remember ever going in there but its not that many years ago the air raid shelter was taken down.

I can also remember my father’s family was from Cardiff and in Grangetown there was a works on the other side of the Taff river and I can remember the barrage balloons way up above. My father worked at the colliery, he was a sawyer …he used to make pit props for underground but in the war they used to make wooden guns, just as a pretence ….they were used by the home guard. My father was in the home guard. He didn’t enlist..he wasn’t in the war because he had part of a thumb taken off…but he did his bit for the war.

Wendy was with us about 12 months, after the war we lost touch, we did go up and stay with Wendy and her family, but eventually we lost touch….but going back about three or four years ago we had a knock at the front door and it was Wendy…because I still live in the house where I was born…and Wendy just on a chance had come back to see if we were still there….and we now keep in regular touch and she’s also been down on holiday. So it was quite moving to be in touch after all these years.

I think the war was a happy time for me. In Pontypool we didn’t really have the bombs dropping, but there’s a little place above Pontypool called Abersychan and my husband’s aunt she lived in a house towards the top of Abersychan where a bomb was dropped.....there was a boiler upstairs that boiled the water and the house was damaged and she was sitting in a chair downstairs in the kitchen…and the chair went forward and protected her as all the boiling water came down….and it was only the fact that the chair went forward that she wasn’t scalded badly. That was my husband’s aunt.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.