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My twin sister and I were 11 years old when war was declared in 1939. We were at school in Plymouth which was 11 miles away from the small village, Ivybridge, when we lived with our parents.

The siren went during the day not long after the outbreak of war and I remember being really scared as we all hurried into the large cupboard under the stairs. We had been advised to use this and fill it with emergency rations, but fortunately never needed them.

Soon every house was inspected and occupiers were told how many evacuees they would be having. This caused much ill felling especially for people who had no children and resulted in many difficulties for the evacuees and those receiving them. We had 2 girls and all got on well, but it was hard work for our mother and I don’t think she really enjoyed it. We joined other members of our family and friends and took the evacuees on picnics and outings, but they all became very homesick and after a few months they had all returned home to London, in spite of the threat of air raids.

Food rationing was pretty strict, but most people had hens in the back garden and everyone grew lots of vegetables and fruit. Day light raids began in Plymouth and so we were moved to school in Totnes. The High School was not far from the railway station, which was bombed in daylight by a stray German plane. We all shot under our desk far quicker then we had ever managed it during practices and I remember it was very frightening at the time and we were all very nervous for a while.

Our neighbours had an air raid shelter built in their garden and we quite enjoyed getting up in the night, when there was a raid on Plymouth and sitting in there with hot drinks etc. As time went on we rarely used it, even when the bombing of Plymouth became very intense — night after night. People in our village were asked to give beds to Plymouth people and we had a Jewish family of four who came every night during the worst of the bombing and we became firm friends for long afterwards.

We somehow felt nothing awful could happen to us and we cycled miles with our friends to the nearby beaches which were still open and swam and sunbathed at Bigbury-on-Sea and rowed out to the mouth of the river Yealm at Newton Ferrers, regardless of what was happening across the channel. If we had lost some of our close family or friends during the war we would probably have felt differently.

We were too young at 13-14 yrs to appreciate the arrival of a huge number of American soldiers at the nearby camp but they were very polite and over generous with sweets, nylons etc. The village pubs made a fortune, and the people of the village did their best to make them feel welcome.

One of my last memories was of a continuous line of army vehicles moving slowly up the road past our house for several days on end in 1944. A large part of the Devon coast had been closed to the public and used for beach manoeveurs in readiness for the invasion of Normandy. We heard a few days later on the radio that this had begun, D Day had arrived.

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