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This story was submitted to the People's War site by CSV/´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Nottingham on behalf of Maureen Masters with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in London just before war broke out, my parents and grandparents told me about what it was like. It was pretty rough. My Mum moved around London from flat to flat. Dad was out of work but took any job he could while waiting for the ‘call up’. One job while he was waiting was to the Dairy. We used to ask him why we couldn’t use a torch or have over our billy lights during the black outs. We though no one would be able to see from up in the sky. He said that one night they were doing their delivery in their van, they were following another van which had 2 tiny little red lights on. So they kept their van lights off and followed the other van. They followed it quite a long way then they had to turn off to the dairy and the other van carried on. when they got to the dairy the other van was at the top of a hill and a German plane flew over and bombed it directly — just from those tiny lights they could target it. If my Dad hadn’t turned off he wouldn’t have survived. That’s why we had the black outs.

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