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My earliest memory of the war was when I was about three years old, in 1941. The siren would go off in the night, and my mum had made a little bed with two small blankets like the sleeping bag. She would take me out of bed, put me in a sack and carry me to the shelter in the back court.

My great gran who was very deaf would go out into the shelter, but then she would go out into the courtyard to see the ‘pretty lights’, which were really the falling bombs — we couldn’t get her to come back into the shelter.

My dad was a war reserve policeman, and one night he was working when an air raid began. My uncle came to take me and Mum from Packington Street to his shelter in Ann’s Place in Stoke. We stopped in a shop doorway at the top of Ford Hill, and the bombs were being dropped all the way up Ford Hill. The next bomb would have been dropped on us at the top of Ford Hill, but luckily they stopped. A passing soldier sheltered in my uncle’s shelter that night and all of a sudden there was panic. No one could find me — I was wrapped up in a little ball, sound asleep on the floor, and the soldier was sat on the bench with his boots on top of me.
I went to Somerset Place Primary School during the war. When the sirens went off we were taken to an underground shelter — called Bunkers Hill. We always had to carry a gas mask each — mine was a Mickey Mouse one. The boys used to frighten the girls and say that there was blood on the walls, but it was just red paint.

A barrage balloon broke loose at the Block House, which was just at the top of where I used to live, and it did damage a lot of roofs. Also a bus blew onto the roof of Milehouse bus depot — there was a bus on top of that for a long time.

As I mentioned, my dad was a police war reserve, and he went into a burning church in Albert Road, rescued the Bible and helped a lot of people out. After the war he offered the Bible back, but they didn’t want it. My mum still has the Bible up in her loft.

During the war I went to live in Paignton for about a year with my mum, and we couldn’t go on the beach, as it had barbed wire along it to act as a deterrent to people, in case there were bombs on it. Then when we came back, after the war, food was in short supply and you couldn’t get much to eat and you had to have coupons, but when I was eight years old I used to go all the way to the bottom of Albert Road for my mum, to queue up to buy her five cigarettes.

I don’t remember a lot more about the war, but when it ended we had big street parties, dancing and singing, and the way the children used to celebrate was by getting a long piece of rope, and swinging it up onto the arm of the lamppost to use it as a swing.

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