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I was 9 years old when war started- the oldest of 5 girls. I remember sitting on our concrete patio on a hot September day. It was Sunday lunchtime. All the neighbours were in their gardens with radios turned up loud. I remember Neville Chamberlain’s grim announcement that we were at war- and the expressions on the grown-ups’ faces. Then, almost immediately the siren went. Our family rushed down to the shelter, really frightened, but it turned out to be a false alarm caused by an unidentified plane.
My father worked in the ford motor company which was turned over to war munitions. We lived near Hornchurch Aerodrome and he bicycled to the night shift in Dagenham. He and my mother decided the children would not be evacuated- we would stay together and if we died, we’d all die together. My dad had been one of the first in the road to get his Anderson shelter and put it in where the foundations had been built for a greenhouse, giving him a good start for a large, deep hole. We had 4 sections, corrugated and arched, as opposed to the usual 3. We were a large family! We called it ‘Cosy nook’! The bottom of our garden ran onto the edge of a road where a mobile anti-aircraft gun was positioned. The men who lived either side of us were away in the army and their wives and children often came into the shelter with us. How we all got in I don’t know but we felt safe there. At first we didn’t go to the shelter every time the siren went but as time moved on and the war progressed, we got up at night and tried to get to the shelter before the bombing started. As my dad was at work, I felt responsible for getting my younger sisters downstairs, through the garden to our safe place. I recall one early incident when we had not got used to all the noise, when my mother and father held up a blanket across the door against the blast and we all prayed God would keep us safe. We had to get up so frequently- four or five times a night- that my dad made bunk beds and we all slept down there. Once, we had been up and down several times and the children were all tired. I got my little sister out of bed and stood her at the top of the stairs. She rolled all the way down and when I rushed to get her, she was still asleep! I well remember standing at the back door, waiting for a lull in the bombing and gunfire and then running down to the shelter. Then the next morning, picking up the shrapnel. I got to know the sound of the ‘Gerry’ planes and could tell them from ours. After a particularly bad raid the head of the local firemen, who lived right across the road, or the ARP warden, would pop round the shelter door to see if we were all right. My dad would come home in the morning with tales of fires he had to put out on the factory roof and how many times he had to dodge between the houses on his way home to avoid the machine gunning of the German planes. The planes used to follow the road through Hornchurch to the Aerodrome and shoot up anything that was moving on the road. Often my dad was cycling on it. He had many ‘close shaves’, once arriving just after a mine had hit the paint shop at the factory where he normally worked. All these things became part of normal life to us and, I suppose, as children, it was very exciting. Once a German pilot landed on dad’s allotment, not far from the Aerodrome, and he was arrested by the home guard. Once we woke up to a garden full of silver paper strips. They were everywhere. We discovered that the Germans had dropped them to confuse our radar.
We slept, played cards and ate in the shelter. We kept a supply of everything we might need down there.
The younger children were dispersed form the schools and received their teaching in the homes of various people. I, being a junior, attended the school building, where we hade indoor shelters as well as some concrete bunkers outside. When I look back on it, I wonder how my mother coped with the complicated timetable for 5 children.
We became great fans of the spitfires on Hornchurch Aerodrome. I organised concerts in our garage to raise money for the ‘Spitfire fund’. There was a write up about this in the local paper about this, and 60 years later, the paper reprinted this and asked if anyone remembered. I was able to respond and, as a result, made contact with my violinist of that time, who is now active in ‘Keeping RAF Hornchurch alive’!
We joined in the St. Andrews youth activities and one day I saw my first doodle-bug from the vicarage garden. The garden was on a hill and I had a good view of the belching flames and heard that never-to-be-forgotten noise. After a while, we got used to waiting for it to stop- and for the explosion.
By the time I started secondary school, the V2’s were coming over. We adopted the philosophy ‘well, if it hits you, you won’t know anything about it!’, and carried on with our lives. I had to travel on 2 buses to get to Brentwood County High School. We had most of our lessons in the long concrete shelters built in the playing field. We thought it was fun! My main concern was what I would find when I got home. I was sleeping at a friend’s house once when a rocket fell on some houses just up the road. There was never any warning. We just heard this great whoosh and fell out of bed. We were upstairs facing where the rocket fell. It destroyed 6 houses in Ravenscourt Drive. We went to school the next morning!
My last memory of anything connected with war was a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1946. Our school had had connections with a boys’ school in Prague before the war. Teachers and pupils had made exchange visits. In 1946 the Czech school wrote to Brentwood to see if we could arrange a post-war visit as guests of the government! My father found it very difficult to find the £36 to cover the cost of the journey but I so wanted to go, he got the money together and I was able to go on the list. My opposite number was a boy called Javoslav Kalvoda and his parents had a tailor’s business in Prague and a country home in Bratislava in the Tatra mountains. The whole event was like a dream to me. We travelled on an old Czech aeroplane with wooden seats and backs that you could push backwards or forwards, so that you could face either way. On the journey over, we hit a storm and had to make an unplanned landing in Frankfurt. American serviceman greeted us and ran with us through the pouring rain to find cover. What an adventure! We were all 16. On our return journey, we had a modern plane with upholstered seats!
We were treated like royalty in Prague and Bratislava, as the first students to visit the country after the war. We were given gifts and flowers wherever we went and the most generous hospitality.
We returned with our Czechoslovakian friends for a month in England. When we had to say goodbye I was heartbroken. I kept in touch for a few years but a communist takeover finally broke the connection.
But I shall never forget those lovely people and the wonderful holiday they gave us.

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