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鈥淭his story was submitted to the people鈥檚 War site by Sam Bailey a volunteer from CSV on behalf of Elaine Roland and has been added to the site with her permission. Elaine fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions鈥�

I was seven when the war started and we lived in london and I think we were bombed and my parents managed to hide that fact from me, goodness knows how. We lived in Maida Vale and we moved. I didn't know quite why we moved we just moved and we moved to Worthing.
In 1940 France fell and my Mother went out to get her washing in one day which she had left out over night. It was covered in thick black soot and she looked out to sea and the sea had been covered with oil and apparently Germans were advancing across the channel and the Navy had set light to oil on the sea. Mother saw the smoke coming up which had made her washing black. She decided we would move back inland and we wandered around for a bit and ended up in Pinner where i live today.
My Father was working in the city during the war and i remember coming home from visiting my Grand parents who lived in Maida Vale and my Father was going on another train to the dentist. Our trains actually ran side by side and we waved to him and then a little while on maybe a minute or two later his train was hit with a bomb and we went home and my mother phoned the dentist and he hadn't arrived so for the next hour or so i can remember my Mother was walking in one direction and me walking in another direction, around the room passing each other without talking. Then my Father returned home covered in glass, pieces of glass sticking out of his face and my mum spent the next three hours or so picking them out with tweezers and she said why on earth didn't you go to the hospital. My Father was a very law abiding man but he had actually bought two eggs on the black market for my sister and myself and he had paid one and six pence each for these eggs and they had broken in his pocket. He had been afraid to go to the hospital incase he was arrested for the eggs he had bought for his children on the black market. I can remember him being terribly upset, not because of the glass in his face but because of the eggs.
Now strangely enough when the number thirty bus was hit in the terrorist attacks on july the seventh and the top was blown off it bought back another memory to me. At the time I used to catch the 83 bus to school and I always used to go on the top of the bus to see if I could get to the very front and on this particular morning i decided to go downstairs. The top of that bus was hit. I walked to school in a daze and state of shock. I was sent home and apparently my uniform was in rags. Seeing the images of the thirty bus bought back hidden memories and really shook me.
i can remember my sister and I being fascinated with watching planes and seeing dogfights and my mother trying to pull us away and she used to get very worried. We used to find pieces of tin foil on the lawn which had been dropped from the sky and no one has been able to tell us what that was about, shredded tin foil.
We also had a Morrison shelter which was like a reinforced table which my parents had erected in the dining room. They put my sister and myself under there during an air raid and I went into this wretched bed and I couldn't bear it I hated it. I said to my Mother "I'm sorry I cant sleep here" and she said "you must theres alot of bombiing going on and its dangerous" and i said with all the drama of a nine year old "if im going to die i'd rather die in my own bed". I realize today how shocked my mother was but at that age it meant nothing, death wasn't unusual in those days.
At one of the stages when the bombing was quite heavy Mum took us to a place called Manings Heath near Horsham. We had a tin bath and she used to bath my sister who was eighteen months old and then put me in the bath and take my sister up to bed and she said "wait for me to come back" she spent ages getting my sister ready for bed and I sat there till the water went cold and I thought right im going to get out. I slipped and fell and put my hands in the fire and I remember the screaming and the blistering and I remember my mother being shaken and saying "your lucky its not your face" but it wasn't much consolation.
We were very strict in those days and we had to where our hat and do what we were told. I can remember when we were out playing one day a plane flying over and started dive bombing. Someone shouted run and everyone scattered in different directions before it started shooting. Most people were just lucky doing what they were told.
When we lived in pinner the italian prisoners of war were stationed in raynors lane just at the bottom of our road and because they didn't have any services from the council and so on they used to trim the hedges. I was then twelve years old and when I used to walk outside I used to be intimidated and terrified by shouts "malta bella" and I didn't know what it meant but I had a rough idea and other things were said. There was nobody else with them they were just walking up and down doing the hedges and i used to have to make this walk and arms crossed because I had a bust.
When france fell my mother decided that I shouldn't tell any one that I was Jewish because she seemed to think if I didn't say that i was Jewish the germans would never know and never mind that my father belonged to a synagogue and they would have checked anyway and I wasn't aloud to say I was Jewish and I had an identity crisis and I denied being Jewish for a number of years because I was at a formative age and I was told not to say something and i didn't say it and I was stuck in that particular rut

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