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The Benchmark Team is the name adopted by the volunteers at the British Schools Museum, Hitchin. Many of them remember the war years. They were asked to provide a childhood memory or two each to assist in the setting up of a 'wartime evacuee experience' at the museum for today's children to learn more about what wartime was like. Their memories are recorded here, with their individual permissions by the British Schools Museum.

- I watched my mother pack my small kit bag — small because I had to carry it onto the ship by myself. At dawn the next morning we were due to report in the school playground. My mother could not do it. Much later I heard that the ship I might have boarded had been sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. (Yvonne L)

- I was just nine years old when war was declared and staying on my father’s cousin’s farm. So we did not hear until lunch time. But my thoughts were of excitement — something new! Coming home from the farm near Chester after a visit when we got to Crewe station, I remember there being no porters. My aunt had given my mother a 25 pound Cheshire cheese; it never left my mother’s side. (Una B)

- One clear memory is of my uncle washing up, as he said we could come out of the shelter as the ‘all clear’ had gone. On VE Day I remember we all wore red, white and blue rosettes that his wife had made. Another memory is getting ready to go to the station to meet my father who was in the army, but he suddenly jumped in through the window as he had caught an earlier train. I was secretly relieved as I hated the noise of steam trains (I was only very young!) (Helen R)

- When I started school in 1944 I remember that whenever the air raid siren went off we had to go to the air raid shelter a short walk from the school. I used to dislike this as it was underground and very dark down many concrete steps into what appeared to me the depths of the earth. I was always pleased when the all-clear sounded and we could get out of this horrible shelter. (Anon)

- My class sat on slatted benches in the brick underground shelter and chanted our times tables while our teacher stood in the narrow space between, and we all listened for the sound of bombs or the ‘all clear’ siren. We did not have an air raid shelter at home, so when the siren sounded and my mum and dad were at work I had to go to the cupboard under the stairs by myself. I was 9 years old. (Daphne G)

- My father was an air raid warden and our garage was the post. We were sandbagged and had wardens and messenger boys sleeping in the house during the heaviest bombing alerts. I was a probationer at York Road Nursery, Letchworth. We were open from 7am to 7pm so that mothers could work in the factories — leaving their babies from 8 weeks old to school age with us. (Margaret C)

- I lived near the Suffolk coast. On some fine mornings on the way to school we could look out to sea and see the vertical vapour trails from V2 rockets that had been launched in Holland, aimed at London. From our school playground we could sometimes hear the coastal anti-aircraft guns firing, trying to shoot down V1 flying bombs. On one occasion an American B17 Flying Fortress was fired on by mistake and it emerged from low clouds on fire. We watched and counted as the crew bailed out (13 I think) and came down by parachute. The last parachute opened as the crewman passed the treetops. After school we cycled the couple of miles to the crash site where we were told that all the crew survived but the last man broke both ankles when he hit the ground. (Mike G)

- A memory of searchlights — as I now know them to have been — probing the sky on a rainy or misty night, like the hands of a giant clock, each with a round end (which I now realise was he disc of light where they hit a low cloud). (Graham K)

- I remember helping my mother, a teacher at Roxeth Hill School in Harrow, to whitewash sheets of newspaper in order for the children to have paper for painting pictures. (Joy F)

- The siren sounded on that Saturday afternoon, as it had for many months. My sister and I played in the garden. This time it was different; the planes overhead were hostile and my father rushed to the garden pushing us into the shelter. When we emerged later that afternoon there were many gaps where there had been houses. (June C)

- I always thought the cracked lavatory pans look funny and strange sitting outside the houses that had been damaged. (Daphne G)

- Three memories: When the warning siren went all our class had to stop work and crawl under our desks. One night we stood in the back garden with Mum and Dad and saw the red glow of London being bombed. On another night we watched and heard the droning German bombers pass over Hitchin — dozens and dozens of them. My father said some poor city was in for a bad bombing. The next day I remember my mother crying about Coventry. Once with my older cousins we had a table at the front gate in Brampton Park Road and sold things for the Red Cross. (Barbara P)

- Just before Christmas 1940 there was a big raid on Manchester. We lived a few miles east of the city. For hours the planes came over. The sky was lit up. I had to go in next morning and the devastation was horrible — places I had known all my life were destroyed. (Joan W)

- As a teenager I was living in a country occupied by the Germans, and 14 of them actually requisitioned a part of our house. It was an immensely frustrating time, but when the British troops liberated us, the feeling was so indescribable that one must have experienced it to understand the pure joy and gratefulness. And I married an Englishman. (Madeleine P)

- I remember the end of the war — all the grown-ups went wild with delight. In my pushchair I was whisked along under arches of fairy lights and everyone was dancing in the street. (Barbara F)

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