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In 1940 aged nine, I (Jean) lived with my mother and father Jack and Marion Findon In Petts Wood, Kent.

One early summer day I was wading with friends through a nearby stream when a train passed on the bridge overhead, crowded with exhausted looking soldiers, many with bandaged heads and dirty faces. When we went home and told our parents, they thought we were making it up to divert attention from our waterlogged Wellingtons. They later learned of the return of troops from Dunkirk.

Later that year, there were dogfights overhead, the Battle of Britain. One afternoon a friend and I were walking down our road with her uncle when he suddenly pushed us down into a front garden and shielded us with his body. I understand there were stray bullets from a morale lowering straffing of Petts Wood Square. One evening we saw a great red glow in the sky which was London Docks burning.

At the small prep. School I attended much time was spent down in the Anderson Shelter singing ‘Ten (or maybe twelve) Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall’ and ‘Run Run Run’. One of the teachers would pop out between raids to prepare our school lunch. At home we sheltered in a cupboard under the stairs and later slept in a Morrison table shelter in the front room.

I last saw my father early in 1942 as he waved from a train en route for Liverpool and shipment to the Far East as a Ware Correspondent for the Daily Express. His last dispatch was in March that year, after which he was posted as missing. I was asked recently if this was traumatic for me (not a word used at the time), but as my best friend’s father had already been killed in a tank, two other friends’ fathers had already been killed in a tank, two other friends’ fathers were prisoners of war in Germany, I didn’t feel exceptional. It wasn’t until I was older that I realised how distressed my mother must have been. I was lucky enough to be fed and looked after and our house was not bombed.

Later came the flying bombs. I was ill in bed with measles until my mother and I slid under the metal framed bed, not knowing the cause of the new sounds, silences and explosions. There were also the silent rockets.

Our local Home Guards brought down a low flying German ‘plane with a rifle bullet to its petrol tank. It was a Sunday, they were late home for lunch and their wives berated them for lingering in a pub rather than bravely doing their duty.

Soon after the war in the Far East ended, the father of a correspondent lost at the same time as my dad telephoned my mother out of the blue and told her unemotionally that she might as well accept the likelihood that the small group had escaped from Java in a boat which was then bombed. That was all we ever really knew.

People were different then, and ‘just got on with it’. Perhaps fortunately counselling had not yet been invented.

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