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At Chipping Sodbury Grammar School, girls in the 5th and 6th Forms were asked to help assemble gas masks in the summer holidays of 1939 — groups would go to the food office, situated the Sodbury's Rural District Council Offices at Lilliput court. I was one of those girls from the school.

Parts of the masks were lined up on a table and we fitted the face masks /visor over the filter and boxed the masks for despatch to families in the district. While at school boys and girls in the 6th form did regular fire watching duty at night.

During the early part of the war we shared our school with children from a school in Birmingham that had been evacuated to us. It was either Sparkshill or Sparkbrook School.

Some students who lived in the immediate area of the school were asked to help at harvest camps. I remember joining one camp at Badminton (the estates of Duke Beaufort) where we stayed and lived under canvas. These were bell tents which could sleep about 6 girls. Staff joined to supervise; and assist with cooking and serving meals in a large marquee. During the day we went out to neighbouring farms to help with the harvesting of barley or wheat. Another activity was helping with the planting of potatoes in the spring and harvesting them during the autumn.

I remember helping when the Yate and Westerleigh Common was taken over by the Ministry of Agriculture to be ploughed up and used for food production. This was part of the "Dig for Victory Campaign".

At 11 am on September 3rd 1939 on the day when war was declared, I remember being in St James church, in Westerleigh. We were waiting for the service to begin. The vicar, the Rev C.E. Luscombe, had brought a radio into church. We sat and listened to Mr Neville Chamberlain announce "His majesty’s Government has this morning declared war with Germany".

Some evacuees had arrived already in Westerleigh, and I can remember them coming to the church. The vicar's wife Mrs Dorothea Luscombe, and I think a member of the W.V.S (Women's Voluntary Service) as it was then, helped allocate them to families in the village.

When there were bombing raids in the city area of Bristol, as soon as the shells sounded some of the villagers took shelter in the cellars under the public house ‘Ye Olde Inn’

The A.R.P (Air Raid Precautions) wardens converted an outhouse in the yard of Ye Olde Inn for their base. Several men of the village were wardens and made sure residents blacked out their windows.

A small army unit was based on the outskirts of the village of Henfield. On Sundays some soldiers marched into the village to attend services at Church. At he nearby village of Pucklechurch was an R.A.F base with a balloon badge. This was a large inflated balloon which I understand were meant to deter enemy planes.

During September 1943 I went to Gloucester to start a teacher training course at Gloucestershire training college of Domestic Science. All students had to take their gas masks of course, and the necessary food coupons as food was rationed. We were treated to one bath a week. We could only have water to a depth of 4 inches!! We had regular fire drill and air raid warnings. We had to sit in the long corridors of the ground floor of the hall of residences, Wotton house. In the long vocation of 1944 all students had to undertake some work to help the war effort. Together with another student friend I spent two weeks helping in the kitchens and serving food to patients at Standish Hospital near Stroud. It was then a TB sanatorium.

Also while still at Gloucester College, students were asked to put on entertainment for wounded military personnel who were recovering at Hartpury House in the outskirts of the city.

When the war ended in Europe students were allowed extended leave and we went to Cheltenham to dance the nights away in Cheltenham Town Hall. Where we met the British, Canadian and American Personnel.

I left college in 1946 and started teaching in Thornbury with rationing still in place until 1951/2, (and beyond) the teaching of domestic science was somewhat limited. But somehow we all managed to make Christmas Cakes and a display for parents to see.

The nearest bombs apart from the bombing of Yate, were bombs falling in fields in Sodbury lane. This was where cattle were slaughtered by random bombs from planes returning from raiding Midland cities. My grandfather owned those cattle, and also some bombs fell near Boxhedge Farm.

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