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It all started with my 8th birthday — 3rd September 1939 — yes, it was the day war was declared with Germany. My party, which had been arranged for Saturday 2nd September, had to be cancelled — most of my friends were being evacuated to the country. But nothing happened in the early days of the war.

We had an Anderson shelter in our garden (half of which had been turned into an allotment by my dad to help the war effort!) and after the ‘all clear’ one morning in 1941, we climbed out of the shelter to see a German pilot floating down on his parachute over our gardens — my dad, who was in the Home Guard (having served in the trenches in France and Belgium in the First World war) had his gun ready (they were well equipped by then!!), just in case he landed in our garden. However the pilot was captured 5 gardens up the road and marched off to the nearest Police station!

When the raids got really bad, we went as a family, Aunts, Cousins and Grandma, to Milton, near Weston-Super-Mare. We rented a detached house on the edge of a wood: I can see the masses of bluebells now, stretching ever onwards like a beautiful blue carpet. I shall never forget the wonderful times my new friends and I spent in that wood. I found my new friends at the local school I attended: there was only one other girl from the London area in the class with me and I believe that we were quite a curiosity until they got used to us!

Time went by, the raids got few and far between and we came home.

One morning in 1944, I was getting dressed for school, when suddenly I heard a plane, very low, and opened my bedroom window and popped my head out — flying over the rooftops, I saw very clearly the pilot with his leather helmet — my mother ran up the stairs and pulled me back from the window. The siren had just sounded and it wasn’t the R.A.F., no indeed, but a German plane and I had actually seen a German pilot. Their objective that morning was the gun site in our local park half a mile from where we lived. Two ATS girls were machine gunned and killed — I was very lucky.

After dreading the buzz-bombs and stepping over rubble (the result of V2 rockets) to go to school, it was wonderful to reach my teens with peace at last. We children had lived through a traumatic 5 years, but I suppose really at our age, it was also a bit of an adventure!

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