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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jeanne Collier and has been added to the website on behalf of Micheline Ann Stevens, with her permission and they fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in May 1940. My father was in the RAMC and sometime in 1941, when I must have been aged just over a year, my mother, Suzie Ruth Farmer, went to do ‘war work’ at a place called Monmouth Hall. She said it was a chemical research establishment and she worked as a ‘block matron’ looking after the male workers. They were mostly young men whose skin had turned yellow as the result of the work they did.

Because this was residential work, I was sent to what my mother euphemistically referred to as a ‘boarding school’ but was in reality a state run children’s home at Burham on Sea, Somerset. Mother said she used to visit me one Sunday a month. She also said there was another small girl there whose mother never visited and that this child and I would fight for my mother’s attention. On one occasion I bit this girl so hard that I drew blood.

I cannot remember any of this but I do have one very clear memory of that place. I was in a big room full of cots. Mine was near the window and I was standing up and holding the curtain to one side. This room must have been on an upper story as I was looking down into a quadrangle across which a nurse, wearing a blue uniform and a large, starched white hat, was walking. I was crying because my nappy needed changing and I still remember my feeling of distress and longing for someone to help me.

I must have been in this place for a year or more but was removed when my mother had to leave work because she was pregnant with my younger brother who was born in March 1944.

Many children were evacuated during the war but I have never met anyone who has heard of these homes, and there surely must have been more than one, let alone been in one. Perhaps it is because most were so small at the time they have no memories.

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