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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Annie Keane of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on behalf of Lilly Reed and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was 8 when war broke out, I had two sisters Joan was 11 and Iris was 7.

When we were evacuated for the first time to Paulton near Bristol, my mother came with us as helper. One family took us all in - Mr and Mrs Harris - he was a miner. I remember there were no there was no gas but they used oil lamps instead.

Also they gave us very poor food. My mum said that they must have made a fortune on what they fed us, because they used to get about 7 shillings a week for each evacuee. A lot of people didn’t really want to take the evacuees.

We only just stayed for about 10 weeks my mum didn’t think it was good enough, so we went back home. We sometimes slept under the dining room table. My Dad was an Air Raid Warden and he insisted that we went into the Anderson Shelter. It wasn’t very nice in there; it was made of steel and was always damp. The Air Raid Warden used to get respect from people — a bit like a policeman these days.

The next time we were due to be evacuated, we got ready to leave and I refused to go at the last minute. I didn’t want to leave my mum. My sisters didn’t stay away for that long my mum was a family person and wanted us all to be together.

Then the next time we all went Hydon Heath in Surrey — my mum was pregnant and so had to leave London. It was a camp and we stayed in huts. My dad used to send us carrots in the post that he’d grown on his allotment. The baby was born in 1941 but he only lived for three days, we didn’t really know what happened or where he was buried. In the family we always talked about him ‘little John.’ People lived through so much in those days.

Then by the time we came home I was at Senior School. We sometimes had to move between different air raid shelters at night. We had to walk a long way to school and one morning we saw a flying bomb land in front of us and a boy that I knew died.

We had street parties that my father organised at the end of the war.

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