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Here is Mr Pickering's recollection of being brought up during the war in Rhyl.

Being a child of six really it did not sink in. I remember going to school and having a gas mask given to me in a cardboard box, then having to wear it and it getting all steamed up. We also used to wear them in school for practice. I suppose seeing so many soldiers all over the place was different. As children, we were instructed that if we heard the siren, we had to move as far as possible from the school into someone’s house for shelter until the all clear sounded.

We also had to go to the various shops for waste paper and cardboard on our way to school for the salvage drive. We also took jam jars, rags and other various items. The hotels became offices for the Ministry of Works and other departments, and the large boarding houses became forces accommodation.

Rhyl became a lot busier with many troops training, and when they went away new ones came here. When I was nine I became an errand boy to a chemist shop. As I was growing up, I had four sister, two brothers and mam and dad. My dad was in the Royal Welch Fusiliers during World War 1, and when it ended he settled to work on the railway. Then, when the Second World War started he was aged 44 and went in the Home Guard. We had a family staying with us, as their father was in the army.

Then came the evacuees — some mothers but mostly children, and they went to live with various people. I remember we always had new friends at school, and they all had things to tell us in class. A lot of our female teachers came back to work as the male teachers served in the forces. All the children knew how to ask the American soldiers for ‘any gum chum’.
As we all grew up I suppose we had then seen the war for what it was.

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