大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Rama and Kieran, pupils from Teversham Primary School on behalf of Ernest Merry and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was 8 when the war started. Evacuees were paraded down the street. People would knock on our door and put evacuees in if we had the beds. We had many evacuees - some parents turned up a week later to take them back!
There wasn鈥檛 any ice cream all through the war and there was no point in telling a child not to eat sweets as you didn鈥檛 get much money to buy sweets anyway. Also clothes and heating were rationed.
My mum started work when all the men went to fight. It was the first time I鈥檇 ever had school dinners and I hated them.
We had an Anderson shelter in the garden in which we would hide if there was an air raid. Once we actually had a bomb in our road. It looked as if half of Cambridge was on fire.
I helped in the college garden in the summer holidays (mainly pulling out weeds) and earned half a crown = 12 and a half pence for working 15 hours!
My next door neighbour made a wooden frame which we pulled down each night so the Germans couldn鈥檛 see any light. I still like the dark.
We didn鈥檛 have a bathtub so we filled a big copper bucket with water and put it over the fire. And we had to save up coal for that!
My brother kept rabbits and it was a great treat to have rabbit pie. We had a dog but we didn鈥檛 eat him! We always gave him the leftovers. We also kept chickens although we didn鈥檛 get our egg rations. We fattened up the cockerel for Christmas.
We lived near an airport and sometimes the sky was filled with planes.
We saw the soldiers come back from Dunkirk. They were badly injured. The old Addenbrookes Hospital was used and some schools were used as hospitals.
We used to go to a cinema nearby for a tuppence. Things were actually harder after the war ended.
We still played and had fun though and we didn鈥檛 think that things were that bad.

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