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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Jan Broderick of the County Heritage Team on behalf of Lisa Bolton and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When war broke out my father decided to send us up to relatives in Shropshire. We were living in London in a huge Georgian house — with a wine cellar and 3-stories. My mother and sister, Mary, and I went and stayed with two different lots of relatives over the first two years. Then we moved into half a farmhouse, and that, aged 5 is when my utopian, innocent war began — and I discovered my love of animals and countryside that has stayed with me since. It was very hard for me to leave my beloved countryside and go back to the city at the end of the war. We stayed 4½ years and saw my father very occasionally. He was a member of the ARP and worked on coal allocation for the ministry. I therefore didn’t know my father at all and found it difficult to relate to him at all until I was a teenager.

It was a village environment — school was 4 miles away in Shrewsbury. Lugging our gas-masks everywhere - they were very claustrophobic as I recall. On one occasion the air raid siren went off. We all had to go into the basement of the school and everyone looked very worried. The teachers were amazing — all the old retired teachers. And very good they were too.

There were an awful lot of ‘true’ evacuees, so there were crowds of children in the village. Some of whom had never seen this kind of countryside at all, and the local kids could be so cruel. It must’ve been awful for them. One day we had great excitement when an off-loaded bomb went off just up the road from the village, and we all rushed up there to pick up bits of bomb with no conception of what it meant.

It was a huge change for us coming from the city to the primitive and freezing cold countryside. We used to wear layers and layers of clothing to keep warm — all buttons, no zips. Used to take ages to get dressed. I remember my awful cousin filling me with tales of ‘the Germans are coming to get you’. One day my mother wanted to dry my red swimsuit in the window, and I was terribly worried that the Germans would see it and bomb us. I kept on blowing on it to dry it out faster.

From having a cook and a nanny, my poor mother went to having no staff. She had to do cooking, cleaning, and childcare herself. We had no electricity and no hot water on tap — only oil lamps, with an oil stove to cook on. But my mother was phlegmatic and never less than a lady, and never spoke of her own feelings.

The children then were kept innocent, unlike now, and many dreadful reports were concealed from us, to protect us. There must have been photographs of one of the German camps smuggled out, because they appeared in the Picture Post. I can remember the farmer and his wife bringing the paper through, and the women crying. The children were agog to see what was causing this, but apart from a glimpse, we were not permitted to see these reports.

We went to London once for a wedding in Croydon and were caught in an air raid — which wasn’t very nice. It is the only time I saw my mother with fear on her face. There wasn’t time to get to a shelter, so we stood in a doorway whilst my mother sheltered us with her body. We didn’t understand what it all the banging and crashing was about.

Everyone was regulated — probably because of the war — everyone had to do their bit. My mother did voluntary work at the hospital by choice. And we all knitted for the troops. One uncle, a pilot, once came to visit when on rest, and he flew his Spitfire over the house: loop the loops and dive-bombing. Oh, it was fantastic! I also had two aunts who worked on the canal-barges down the Thames, taking supplies up-and-down to the docks. These were gentile ladies who would be doing their embroidery normally. Extraordinary. A very rough life.

Our beautiful house in London was hit by a doodle-bug a more-or-less direct hit that destroyed the house. There was such destruction. But we still managed to salvage some pieces of furniture which I still have today. An odd thing was that next-door had chickens and every one of them survived the blast, although they were blown some distance. The elderly couple who looked after the house for us, were safe in the cellar, fortunately unharmed although the firemen had to dig them out. But she was distraught as over the following weeks looters took everything they could find.

Rationing was atrocious and I didn’t realise until after the war that mother could actually make good pastry, but was restricted by the lack of fat to make horrible cardboard pastry containing dried egg. Food was very restricted and we had to dig for victory, although in the country we had some advantages with food and so on. My mother was wonderful — she produced great meals based on very little.

You didn’t have the money or coupons, even if there was any available. And then there was liberty bodices with ribs and buttons — like an iron lung! I didn’t know what it was to have new clothes, it was always hand-me-downs. I had no new coat until I was about 11. It was always somebody else’s shoes, somebody else’s stockings. Even somebody else’s knickers!

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