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It is funny to think now that the war was quite a happy time for children. If we had been evacuated to air- raid shelters during the school day we used to hope that we would have to stay there longer than two hours. If this were the case, a teacher would come around and give each of us a sweet.

If there was an air raid during the night we would not have to go into school until 10 o’clock the next morning. This gave us some extra time to sleep. There was some confusion when one night there were no raids until 5am. My parents thought that this did not count and sent us to school for 9 the next morning. However lot of children did not come in until 10 so we got to play in the playground until they arrived.

Our neighbours decided that they wanted a joint air- raid shelter with us and so we sand bagged our garage. One night a bomb dropped only two streets away and I still remember that extraordinary feeling of the earth coming up and going back down again, and coming up and going back down again.

There were also brick air raid shelters on the streets. Our Aunt and Uncle were coming to Wealdstone to visit us when they saw planes shooting at each other overhead. They dived into one such brick shelter for cover and when they looked up they realised it had no roof on it and they could still see the planes firing. They arrived at our house laughing at the situation, despite its seriousness.

Before the Morrison shelters were developed my parents had managed to rig up their bed as a shelter, which us children slept under. However one morning the strings holding the bed up broke and the bed collapsed on top of my sisters and I. One of my sisters was lying on her back so her face looked an awful mess. My other sister and I were very jealous that she was getting all the attention because although our injuries were not as visible, we were just as hurt!

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