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This story was submitted by Helen Hughes of the People's War team in Wales on behalf of Dorothy Clissold (formerly Robinson) and is added to the site with her permission.

I was born in 1933 so I was 6 years old when the war began. I was in Nantyglo… we didn’t see much of anything. I remember when it started my mother wouldn’t take her clothes off when we went to bed at night because my father was a miner and she was afraid for us three children. She was afraid to take her clothes off in case something happened because my father worked nights so she was always on her own. For three months she did that but then it wears on you after a bit and you get used to things…so things went back to normal after that. The war went on…we had double summertime so it was always light to eleven o’clock and we children could go out and play and one plane came down on the Blaenavon Road near Nantyglo on the Mildred Mountain. The children scrabbled to get up there and they were taking some aeroplane glass and they were making rings out of it and things like that. I can remember my brothers making brooches and things like that. We children were too young to be scared…but I didn’t see an orange right through the war and I never saw a banana and when we did have it, my mother shared it between the three children. She didn’t have it nor my dad didn’t have it. They shared it between us children. We used to queue for things — they’d say so and so’s in rhys’s shop or oranges are in palmers shop…so you’d rush there and queue and most probably by the time you got to the front of the queue they’d be sold out. Those little things I remember.

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