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When I was a small child — a very small child I was - I saw the barrage balloons over London. I understood them to be full of barbed wire so that when the Germans jumped out of their planes to bomb us they would land on the barrage balloons caught up in all the barbed wire, that’s what I thought they were for. Another thing, searchlights; I was very small and could only understand ‘church lights’!
Well, on Sunday we went to pray to win the war, well somebody, the vicar had to get the message to God up top, so he sent it up by Morse code, which was the searchlights which I thought were church lights telling God we’d got to win the war — just a child’s understanding! For a long time, I never said it to anyone, that’s what I thought it was all about: I couldn’t understand ‘search’ but I could ‘church’, a child’s understanding, you see.

My home was in London, but I was evacuated down to Woolacombe in Devon with my school, which took you from a few months. I was three when we went down and was eight when we came back. We only saw our parents rarely; they did write to us but we couldn’t really see them because they were in London. My father had to stay in London, and my mother stayed with him. I can’t remember how often we came back to London, my sister remembers more than me; we spent more time down at school in Woollacombe. We spent Christmases down there: you only knew it was holidays because the headmistress said today’s a holiday and now we’re going on the beach, because term and holiday - it was all sort of rolled into one. We stayed at school, we boarded at the school, we were evacuees and were evacuated along with others down to Devon — all the children had to be evacuated out of London for safety, and so off we went along with everybody else.

I can’t really remember how I got used to it, I was too young really - it was just part of the fact of life. There were all the Americans training down there on the Woollacombe sands: we didn’t know what they were training for but of course it was for D-Day, so there was all the American personnel down there and of course there was all the children. I didn’t understand what it was all about because we were children; this was a child’s understanding of barrage balloons, you see!

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