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I was 16 years old and boarding at Blackford-Sexes School in Somerset in 1939, where I had been evacuated.

We had to race under the stairs during air raids and everyone was on edge. When I took my exams — equivalent to GCSE’s - all the windows were riddled with black paper and we had to make sure that there were no cracks of light showing.

My home was a farm in Gloucestershire on the border of Worcestershire and the Vale of Evesham. I left school in the summer of 1940, and when I returned home I found that it had been taken over by the 51st Highland regiment.

The animals were all out in the fields as they had taken over the outbuildings and barns. They were sleeping and cooking in an office that was manned night and day as a detention centre for soldiers who never quite got back in time. There were ammunitions and lorries under the trees.

We lived in the house, my father and stepmother, two sisters and four evacuees — two of these were aged 10 and 12 and were from Dagenham in Essex and there was a boy aged 7, and a girl aged 5 from Birmingham. They didn’t stay throughout the war.

I worked on the farm helping my father who had heart problems; this consisted of milking the cows at 6am, as part of my chores. During hay-making, this was all horse drawn as there was no mechanisation of course, the poor horses couldn’t drink from the troughs I remember, as the men had used them for shaving in.

The regiment eventually left in September after we had the first bombs dropped locally on August 30th, there were three bombs. We thought that we had been targeted in the Vale of Evesham as we had the soldiers there, but it turned out that the Germans had followed the Severn and got lost and just dropped their bombs, it killed one of our cows. Bits of shrapnel were coming out of the poor cows for weeks afterwards, and there was a huge crater in the newly mown field where they were.

When the soldiers were guarding our gate they challenged visitors that they didn’t recognise and so different guards often stopped my sister’s fiancé, fortunately, he was not put off and they were eventually married, late, on 26th October 1940.

Some of our land was commandeered by the War Office, it was given back after the war, and was made into a permanent site for first the British and then the Americans. One black American helped me with some farm work every morning and so the white soldiers would not speak to me, same if you danced with them — no white soldier would dance with you that night. They were segregated. There were two black boxers who came across after seeing my father splitting logs and they helped him, by doing it for him. They stayed until the end of the war.

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