大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jane Cave for Three Counties Action on behalf of Mollie Jenkins and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions.

When the war began I was at Luton High School for Girls and we shared our school for the first winter with the North London Collegiate College and this meant we only had morning lessons.

Air raids were part of our school life. When the siren sounded for an air raid all the girls had to crouch by their desk while the teacher, wearing a tin hat, went out to see if she could see German planes. If no planes were to be seen at that moment she sounded a horn and on hearing this the girls would run across the hockey pitch to the shelters. I remember in 1944 a V2 bomb landed near the school breaking many windows, but fortunately the girls were on holiday.

I remember a doodle bug coming down in the fields between Clophill and Silsoe and just missing a wood that had been taken over by the army for storing ammunition which was another near miss.

Life went on in a normal sort of way in our very close knit community - there was always plenty of fruit and vegetables and the odd rabbit, hare and pheasant helped to eke out the meat ration. My memory of the war in our village was of a safe and happy time - we knew where the enemy was.

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