大象传媒

As a child, the war started for me on the 1st of September because it was on that day that I was evacuated with my school.

Carrying one suitcase, a gas mask and a packet of sandwiches, we walked from our school, James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich, to the local station and the train which was to take us to the village of Lenham in Kent. We were to stay there for just one week before being transferred to Sevenoaks but during that week of lovely summer weather we spent all the time, with our teachers, walking around the local countryside - no lessons which we thought was marvellous!

I was surprised that there were no trenches anywhere because all I knew about "war" was that in the First World War my father had been "in the trenches".

Once in Sevenoaks, billeted with families all over the town, we shared accommodation during the week days with a girls' boarding school. One week we had sport all the morning whilst they had lessons, the following week we had lessons in the morning and they had sport. It was exciting and frightening at the same time but most of us were homesick.

This was the time of the "phoney" war and so just before Christmas we returned home to Dulwich and the first term of 1940 saw us living at home going to school as usual. However following Dunkirk in May and what was thought to be imminent invasion, we were sent away again, this time to Lyme Regis in Devon billeted around the town and nearby villages and attending the local 鈥渕ixed鈥� Secondary School. Having no brothers this was very strange to me and I thought the boys were very silly !

This was a lovely summer term for us, particularly for my friend and I, as we were billeted with a Doctor and his wife whose children were away at boarding schools. She used to meet us from school with a picnic and we would have it on the beach - the war seemed a million miles away.

At the end of July - still no invasion - so back home we came. By this time my father was in the army (Commanding Officer of a camp in Norfolk), my mother had been recruited into the Civil Defence as she had been a nurse, and my older sister was working in the Air Ministry in London by day and as a Red Cross Nurse at the local hospital in the evenings.

The family had moved whilst I was away to a house in Forest Hill next door to which was a very old house that had been built as a Lodge at the entrance to an Estate. It had a large cellar which had had props put in so that it could be used as a Shelter in case of Air Raids. So it was that in the early days of September 1940 my grandmother, who lived with us, and I were invited into the cellar each evening when the air raids started and it was only days later that a huge bomb fell on to a large block of flats behind the house, crashing the flats down on to the Lodge and burying us in the cellar.

The noise and the dust and the fear that no-one would find us is something I will never forget. After one and a half hours we were finally dug out from under the rubble - the props had saved our lives.

My father was given 48 hours leave to find us somewhere to live as our house was unsafe and had to be demolished. The irony of being twice evacuated and then coming home to the bombing never fails to amaze me.

The rest of the war is a kaleidoscope of still vivid memories - first of all sleeping in a street shelter, back home for breakfast and then off to school (wondering each day if your friends would still be there) - later a Morrison shelter in the dining room at home. Picking up shrapnel on the way to school, seeing enemy planes overhead and having to study for exams in the school shelters. My father dashing home for a few days leave to see if we were all right, and my mother on duty throughout the war crawling through the wreckage of bombed houses to treat the wounded.

We had our share of incendiaries, doodlebugs and rockets. We had rationing - how I longed for more butter and sweets! But we also had the radio with ITMA, Music While You Work, Much Binding in the Marsh and other wonderful programmes to make everyone laugh.

And then it was VE Day. My sister took me up to London and we stood amongst the crowds to see Mr Churchill come out on a balcony in Whitehall and then on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the King and Queen and the two Princesses. The war in Europe was over 鈥� and we were among the lucky ones to survive.

Angela Perry (nee Lawson) 20 Shirley Church Road, Shirley, Croydon CR0 5EE

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