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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Morwenna Nadar of CSV/´óÏó´«Ã½ LONDON on behalf of Mrs. Doreen Anne Richardson and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was two years old when war broke out. My mum immediately took me to relatives in Cambridge but when nothing happened, we came back to Walworth in South-East London. My dad had a shoe repair shop in Carter Street, Walworth. He had a gammy leg, due to polio when a child, so he couldn’t go in the forces. He had to do fire-watching duties instead.

There was a lot of bombing all around us. At first, when I was about 3, the sirens used to upset me, but soon, if I was playing out in the street, I would just abandon my tricycle or my dolls’ pram and run back to the shop. We used to sleep in the cellar for safety. I now realise how unsafe that was as the shop and living accommodation had been built in the early 1880s and would have collapsed on top us if bomb damage had happened. We moved to another part of Walworth when I was 4 because we needed more room. Until then I had been sleeping in a cot in my parents’ room as there had been no place to put another bed. Our new flat was in East Street (where the famous market still is) and I remember going through an entrance archway and standing gazing at the block of flats. I was very excited because the building seemed so big and I had such a big bedroom all to myself! I remember the archway had 2 solid brick walls built on to it in such a way that you had to do a sort of half figure of eight to go through. I think that must have been to try to give some protection against bomb blast.

I went to school when I was 5 and I don’t remember any incidents while I was there although there might have been bomb scares. When I was about 6 the doodlebugs started coming over. I remember we would watch them from the veranda until they cut out, and we would then run for cover. One lunch-time my dad was returning to the shop when our flats were hit. Our block wasn’t actually hit but the front door was blown up the passage. My dad helped where he could but was anxious to get back to us to make sure we were all right. After that, I was sent back to my aunt in Cambridge but returned to my parents in London after 6 months. For some reason that I was never told, I didn’t go to school when I was with my aunt, so that might have been why my parents brought me back to London before the war ended.

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