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My mother during the war worked at the RAF place called Hanbury Dump where they kept bombs underground. However the dump blew up in mysterious circumstances. On this particular day my mother had decided to have a day off ‘for the queen’ as she called it, and went to visit her friend who lived in Leicester. When she went back to her office the next day, all the windows were blown out. Some people say it was sabotage by the Prisoners who were working there — think they were Italians. Other people said it was caused by someone using a metal type hammer to remove the fuses, instead of a brass one which won’t give off a spark.

When I was at school in Andover, Bournemouth, the sirens would go off during an air raid. You could see the planes in the night sky. We would run down into the shelter with blankets so we wouldn’t get cold. Sometimes it was an hour or sometimes three before the all clear siren went.

You couldn’t get any sweets. All food was rationed and every one had a ration book. You got so many ounces of butter, sugar or rashers of bacon and the grocer would take these tickets out of the ration book so he knew you’d had your weekly allocation.

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