大象传媒

I was born in March 1935 so when the War started in September I had just started school at four and half.

Because we were a big industrial city we were aware that we might be a target. So in fact we had what they called an 鈥渆arly war鈥� when the evacuees started going out, it wasn鈥檛 just in London but in Birmingham too. I was the youngest of four girls and we were evacuated out to Leicester which was the next Thursday or Friday and you hear a lot of stories about how well evacuees were looked after, well we weren鈥檛. There was three of us and I was just coming up to five and then two sisters so it was five, eight and eleven. My mother had to let us go, there was no choice. My mother said are not to be separated and we are to be kept together, that made it difficult and I remember we went to this house and there was an old woman to look after us. If you bear in mind that I was used to my own room, and we were all put in one room with one bed to share, we felt very badly looked after.

We had nightly raids and day raids. You could hear when they did the bombing. Birmingham did so much toward the War effort with planes and all that sort of thing. We used to hear planes go over, but because raids came, there were these big claxons would go. When they came over I used to get sick and I had to clear it up myself. The result of that, of being sick all those years ago, is I can鈥檛 bear anybody being sick. And when I am sick now, I cry for my Mum, as old as I am now!

We were not away for long, only a few months when they said this is an early war and my mother said if we are going to die we will die together. In the meantime my father had built up an Anderson Shelter. And he fitted it with bunk beds, because my mother and my father were members of the ARP. In the end my mother found out what was happening and she brought us back home.

We were luck in the house, we never had any direct hits. We did have a few slates off but never bombed out. At night we went to the shelter and lived there. The only people who didn鈥檛 come in were my parents because they were air raid wardens. The only time they came in was to give us a hot cup of cocoa.

We all went to an all girls school and that was a 40 minute walk because there was no busses, so we used to walk to school and when we went to school we never knew if the school will be there and it was bombed at one time and they dug up the tennis court and built a big underground shelter so that we could taken there. We always had to go home in groups, never allowed to go home alone and we had to stay in the school fields when you walked home.

I can remember a couple of times being caught in a day raid and machine gunners come down because that鈥檚 what they used to do. You tried to stick to the side of the road but they were so quick, in and out!

When she came home she used to bring us bags of fruit and vegetables, and of course we had the rationing. In those days we didn鈥檛 eat a lot of sugar and we used to exchange our sugar of butter or eggs. We never went hungry and we ate well so I cant understand why people complained because the rations gave you the basics to live on and you used your initiative.

Those years left a big impression.

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