大象传媒

This story was submitted to the Peoples War site by Anastasia Travers from CSV Action Desk on behalf of Brenda Mann and has been added to the site with her permission. Brenda Mann fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was 11 years old when the war started and it was decided to evacuate children in the Selly Oak area because of being close to the Austin works. In the end we didn鈥檛 get much bombing because we lived near to the University of Birmingham but as the clock tower was used as a landmark me, my sister and cousins were evacuated to Stoke Prior just outside Bromsgrove. At that time we thought we were being taken to the end of the world!

We took our gas masks and a little parcel of food for our foster parents. When we got there we had to go into the village hall and be allocated to different families. We were sent to a Mr and Mrs Harris who already had 2 grown up daughters. They had to sleep with us the first night because we were crying.

Some of our teachers came with us from St Edwards and we had one teacher Mr Boggan, who we used to ask if we could go to Hanbury Common. When we got there we would leave him and run to the farm to play around.

After 6 weeks we came home because we were homesick and didn鈥檛 get on with the other school children. When we came back we had lessons at home because of the bombing but never really had that much. When the sirens went my sister would start shaking and we would go to the shelter but it was so cold that we eventually stayed in the house and slept under the stairs.

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