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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Annie Keane of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on behalf of Stella Aiken (nee Ruffles) and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the sites’ terms and conditions.

We lived in Wellbeck Street. I was 7 in 1939, my sister and I were evacuated to Brighton on the 1st September before war was declared. When we got there we had to stand in a hall at the Dome in Brighton. We had a little suitcase, a blanket, a gas mask and a brown label with our name on. The local people would come along and choose who they were going to take. We were really lucky because five of us (including my sister’s friend) got taken in by a lady who owned a bakery.

My sister was a pupil at Greycoats School in Victoria. Many of the pupils from Greycoats were transferred to Varndean School for Girls in Brighton. Greycoats pupils used to have the school in the morning and Varndean pupils in the afternoon. I was at primary school at the time.

After a year we had to leave the South Coast because they thought that the Germans were going to invade there. We got sent to Farnham in Surrey and I really didn’t like it. I was a child born in the centre of London, I didn’t like the country and I thought that the people there were a bit stupid. The people I was staying with used to take us to church and I didn’t like that either. I got moved around quite a lot then probably because I was a bit naughty.

In 1943 after the Blitz had ended we all came back to London. When I came back to London, there’d been a lot of bomb damage especially round the City and St. Pauls. I remember seeing all the flowers growing on the bomb sites. I’d got into Greycoats Grammar School by then but we used to have all our lessons in the corridors because they were worried about being bombed.

There was no TV then, in the evenings we used to sit around and listen to the radio, but the main thing was going to the cinema. We usually went twice or three times a week.

There used to be V1s and V2s landing in London. The V1 you could hear a throbbing sound and then it would cut out and you knew it was about to land somewhere. The V2s were rockets I saw one of them go through the sky once but they were hard to spot. The closest I came to a bomb was one day I was walking down Wigmore Street and one landed on a pub behind me which was full of American servicemen and their girlfriends. It was awful. I got pushed into a doorway by the blast.

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