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This story was submitted to the People’s War by a volunteer from CVS on behalf of Afreaw Coppins-Moroney and has been added to the site with her permission. Afreaw Coppins-Moroney fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Our house was bombed during the winter of 1941 and I was only fourteen years old. The building was in Golborne Road, North Kensington; I lived there with my parents, my brothers and sisters, but we all survived because at the time of the bombing we were hidden in the air raid shelter nearby with another family. When the bomb exploded the shelter shook and all the children started to cry, it was a terrible and frightening moment. When we came out the following morning, I saw that two big lumps of the house had been destroyed and that the fireplace was hanging out from our sitting-room whose walls had collapsed. It was a very painful time and for a little while we had to stay at friends until the house was repaired, but we all felt extremely lucky to have survived from the bombing and we also felt that God was watching over us.

The bombings were going on every night, but we didn’t wait for the sirens, we went inside the shelter regardless to feel safe. We used to go there straight after school or work, sometimes at lunch time, and we ate and slept there. It was about twelve of us there: me, my family and another family with children. We were very young, I was the second eldest, and I remember that for us the whole thing of hiding in the shelter was rather exciting. It was probably because our parents tried everything possible to make it easy for us, and because we were also mixing and living with other people. My mum and the other women laid some sheets and carpets on the cold cement floor, and they hung on the walls pictures of film stars and people to make the shelter cosy. We all slept in bunker beds and because there wasn’t a toiled, we placed a bucket in a corner and hung some curtains around it for some privacy. They also brought there all the food they cooked at home so that we could eat there and be safe. There was very little food available as the rations were very short, but we managed and we always shared between each others, between neighbors, families and friends. There was very little meet and everything was made at home, like pies and bread. The clothing was also difficult to get, things like stockings were quite impossible to find —me and my friends used to paint our legs and put a little bit of black up the legs…

I remember that to cover up the noise of the bombs, my dad brought a little organ from home and he used to play it while we sang old London songs. Everyone had a favourite song, mine was ‘Knees up mother Brown’, and we all sang loudly and danced and laughed to kill the noise of the bombs.

Although the times were difficult, the war brought people close together; there was a sense of closeness with one another that I don’t think the young generations have now. Everybody was poor those days, but we were happier than what they are now. People now don’t live as happy as we were with the war on! We had very little, but we were grateful that we had it and we shared everything. People mixed because we were all in the same boat.

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