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I'm a pupil from Heaton Manor Comprehensive School, Newcastle Upon Tyne, entering Ada Kennedy's story onto the website, and they fully understand the website terms and conditions of use.
I was six and a half years old when the war began. I remember sitting at school in an air raid shelter with everyone around me singing as loud as they could whilst the sirens were going off.
At the beginning of the war we used to run to the air raid shelter once the siren had sounded. After a while my mother and grandmother would pack bags every night and we would go to the air raid shelters and sleep there until early in the morning. The shelters had many wooden bunks and were quite dull. Most nights we met the same people there.
Food was in short supply during the war and you would only receive fixed amounts as it was rationed. It was also really hard to take your mind off the war as there were constant reminders of it and we were always waiting for the sirens to go off.
I was not evacuated during the war because my father was in the army and was away at the beginning of the war. I was also an only child so my mother kept me with her at home. My father was in the army and was at Dunkirk and North Africa where he was taken prisoner of war. My father had been reported missing and one of my main memories is of my uncle banging on our front door very early one morning. He had come to tell my mother that my father was a prisoner of war and he had heard his name on a list of prisoners on the very early morning radio. My father was in a camp in Italy and then in Germany until the war was over.
When the war ended we had to wait for my father to be brought home and demobbed. I remember being at the central station two or three times waiting for the troop trains coming in to meet my father. We did not know when he would be arriving. There were hundreds of people waiting for these trains not knowing if or when the person they were waiting for would be coming home.

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