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When the war started, school changed a lot for several different reasons. One of the main reasons was that many people were evacuated so the classes became quite small.

You had a choice about being evacuated. If you want to get evacuated, people would arrange for you to go and stay in the countryside like my best friends family. We decided to stay though because my dad worked in the shipyards and he had to stay put and my mam didn’t want to leave him.

At school, a lot of different things happened. Every morning, everyone would go up to the long air raid shelters up on the field. When everyone was in, we used to have a singsong then go back down to the school. This was so if the air raid siren went off we would know exactly what to do.

Another precautionary measure was that separate classes would go to parent’s houses to have lessons. In our house we had the sowing class. My mam used to get really annoyed, because if the pupils couldn’t get their needle through the material, they used to stab it through and it made loads of pin prick marks on the furniture, so my mam had to put a stop to that and told them not to do it. We also had lessons in the hospital and in the church, which meant we did a lot of walking and not that much work.

We didn’t have to wear uniform because the clothes were rationed and people needed the coupons for other things that were more essential. It was good not having to wear uniform but there was something that cancelled the good thing out. We were all given gas masks that we had to carry round with us everywhere and every day we had tests to see how quickly we could get it on. I know it was for our safety but it was just a pain to remember we had it and when we were walking a lot it was so heavy that the string used to dig into my shoulder.

All the beaches were off limits. This was because there was a fear of German troops invading. Because of this, all entrances down to the beach were cordoned off and there was barbed wire scattered all over the beaches. There was also a barracks at Seaburn and there was lookout posts right the way along the coast. In the summer holidays though, the troops took the barbed wire down from the entrances to the beaches for one hour and we were allowed onto the beach. Everyone used to be waiting for the signal and as soon as we could, we would rush down onto the beach and play whether it was hot or cold. Just the idea of having that one hour was amazing.

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