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In September 1939, I was first evacuated at the age of five. I went from Ford’s Jetty in a paddle streamer with my mum and my brother, who was three. We went to Norfolk.

When we got there, they weren’t expecting so many people and we slept in a school in a sack filled with straw. I can still feel the prickle of that straw today.

We stayed in a room in a farmhouse and Dad visited us on his motorbike because he was a Stevedore in the London Group of docks. We stayed there for a while (how long I don’t know exactly). Then, as all was quiet, we came back to Dagenham. Then the bombing did start…

Instead of going to bed at night, we just slept in the air raid shelter. This is because it got so bad that Mum would have to wake us up in the middle of the night to take us down to the air raid shelter. The shelter was at the bottom of the garden. My dad dug it really deep. Because my dad was good with his hands, he had the floor cemented instead of the mud most people had. He also set up electric light in the shelter instead of using torches.

I don’t know how we managed it but we had 7 people in the shelter: my immediate family and the neighbours. I managed to sleep somehow. My dad slept in a deckchair all night and somehow managed to get up for work next day — manual work in the docks. He also was an ARP warden. The reason he wasn’t called up was because he had a reserved occupation, and he was in his forties when the war broke out.

We still went to school but when the bombing got too bad, we couldn’t get to school. Then we had our lessons, with a visiting teacher, in the front parlour of a neighbour’s house. We still played out, as kids do; we still did errands for our mums.

Parents wouldn’t say this nowadays but my mum used to say that if the air raid warning went, to knock on someone’s (anyone’s) house and ask if we could come down their shelter with them. And when you did this, the person you asked would always say ‘yes.’

We were on rations and we were always short of sweet food. So I used to wait until my mum went out, then put a spoonful of sugar, a spoonful of cocoa and a spoonful of dried milk in a piece of newspaper and eat it with my fingers. I tasted lovely — just like real chocolate (or so we thought at the time).

I loved chips as a child but fat was in short supply. Once, I was in our scullery, watching my mum do the frying; she had a bottle in her hand, which she tried to hide. It turned out that she was frying using castor oil!

We loved tea, which was also in short supply. So my mum used to dry out used tea leaves, then put them back with the unused tea leaves, with a pinch of soda to make it look darker. I don’t know if this any good or not!

In those days, flour used to come in linen bags with the name of the baker’s stamped on them. We were so short of coupons to buy curtains that my mum used to save the bags, boil them up to get the stamp off, dye them cream (with ‘dolly dye’) then sew them all together to make curtains!

She had to be resourceful. In fact, she even had a coat made out of a brown army blanket, made by a tailor who lived down our road.

Then in 1944, I was evacuated again, this time with just my brother; I was ten and he was seven.

It’s amazing to think now but you didn’t know where you were going and your parents didn’t know. In fact, they didn’t know where you were or who you were with until they got a postcard from you!

When we left, I had no suitcase because we didn’t have holidays. I had my change of clothes in my dad’s old kit bag. We left from a London station and before we left, my mum said to me, ‘Make sure you look after your brother and stay with him.’

When we got to Paignton (in Devon), we went to the village hall and the ladies picked out who they wanted. Someone wanted to take me on my own, and I was quite brave really because you didn’t talk back to grown-ups, I said, ‘I mustn’t be split up from my brother.’ So nobody wanted us and we were the last in the hall.

Then we were taken round the streets by a WVS lady to 12 Church Street, Paignton. The lady that took us in was Mrs Badcock. We were well looked after but Mrs Badcock had a maid that didn’t like us. The maid used to accuse us of doing things we hadn’t done and get us into trouble.

The first few days I was there I cried and cried. But I soon settled in; kids are resilient. We went to school there and had a normal schooling. I joined the Brownies there and my brother joined the cubs. We used to go to church and Sunday school, which was something I hadn’t done before. Because I was a good reader, I even read from the lectern.

I stayed there (according to my Bible) until July 1945. Then we came home. Mum and Dad were there to meet us when we arrived with a bed sheet with ‘Welcome Home’ written on it. There were flags everywhere and we were glad to be back.

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