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I was six years old when war broke out and can remember the pre-war period when the threat of war came and went. I remember my mother squirreling away bags of sugar in the spare bedroom and being fitted with a Mickey Mouse gasmask. Presumably my parents must have thought the threat had passed because at the being of 1939 we moved down to Worthing where my mother planned to open a guest house.
The summer of 1939 was wonderful and I was thrilled to be living almost on the beach which is where I was when the first siren sounded. I don’t remember if we knew what it meant but the mournful wail was enough to send me running back up the road for home. My mother had rushed out of the house and grabbed me by the hand and dragged me into the meter cupboard under the stairs where we crouched until the all cleared sounded. It had been a false alarm.
The guests were replaced by evacuees. Poor little things from the East End of London, arriving from in the dark with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. My mother did her best to make them feel at home, but what a fight she had getting them to take a bath or to eat anything she cooked. It seemed the only food they liked was bread and jam. Do you like porridge my mother asked the little girl? Oh yes she said but when my mother put a bowl of stew in front of her she said ‘cor this is lovely porridge.’ My mother was sure that she never eaten either porridge or stew in her life.
From these poor children I caught head lice and worms. My poor mother was distraught when the police came round accusing one of the boys of stealing. Homesick, they soon went back to London.
Later we had two boys from Battersea Grammar School who did know the difference between porridge and stew and ate us out of house and home. Suddenly Worthing was no longer considered safe. Barbed wire and landmines were laid on the beach and the Grammar School boys went home but we stayed though many of the occupants of our road fled.
We were spared heavy bombing but when the battle of Britain started in earnest we would lie awake hearing the planes droning overhead. Sometimes the returning Germans would jettison any bombs they had not dropped onto the town before crossing the channel back to France and during the daylight hours reconnaissance aircraft would fly over the town sending the ack-ack gun at the bottom of our road into a frenzy, though I doubt they ever shot one down. I remember going to pick blackberries on the downs with my mother and watching a dog fight overhead. Probably the worst experience was when a landmine washed up on the beach and exploded blowing out every pane of glass for a mile. Even my father, a heavy sleeper was woken by the force of the bang and indignantly accused my mother of not putting the dustbin lid back on properly.
Mostly Worthing got away without too much damage though several ‘doodle bugs’ were shot down before the military realised what they were dealing with. We would lie awake at night hearing them humming as they passed overhead, like everyone else praying the engine would keep throbbing until they were over the downs were we prayed they would be shot down before they reached London.
In 1943 a unit of the Tank Regiment moved into the road at the back of our house. My friends and I would talk to the young soldiers as they worked on their tanks and provided the Sergeant Major was not around, climb inside. My father was furious with me the day he saw me sitting on the gun turret. ‘Don’t let me ever catch you up there again. You’ll get that poor soldier into trouble.’ I am afraid he was right but in our defence the young soldiers encouraged. We helped them to forget what was coming for a while. Then suddenly the road was empty. Nothing to show they had ever been there apart from patches of oil. That was just before D-Day. I thought about Jack, Dave and Dusty and the rest and wondered how many survived.
My Mother and I were on the Isle of Wight when we heard that Germany had surrendered. We were walking on the cliffs at Alum Bay when we met another hiker. He asked ‘did we know that that Germany had surrendered?’ We said ‘no’ and danced and hugged each other. That night we watch the search lights from the ships in Portsmouth Harbour criss-crossing the sky triumphantly and joined the crowds celebrating on the main street in Ryde. I remember being worried for the young sailor who had thrown his hat on top of the Post Office building. ‘Will they punish him?’ I asked. ‘I doubt it,’ said my mother.

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