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This story was submitted to the website by Eleanor Fell at Bracknell Library on behalf of Yvonne Forster, who has given her permission for her story to go onto the website.

I was only four when the war started and I was living in West Wickham in Kent, not far from Biggin Hill.

Bombs seemed to follow my family as we had to move house not once, but twice due to the bombings. The first time was right at the beginning of the war in 1939. We were in a neighbour’s Anderson shelter in the garden opposite our house, as our own had been flooded. I was in there with my mother, Dorothy Brotherhood, and our neighbour, Mrs Workman and her family.

There wasn't enough room for us all to lie down, so we snoozed in an upright position. I remember hearing the bombs and the airplanes going over, but when I woke up in the morning I was shocked to find that our house had completely gone.

Everything was destroyed - the only thing remaining was the plaque that my father had laid in the garden by the fishpond, to commemorate my birth. I lost all my toys and clothes and everything really. We were lucky because people were very very kind and they realised that it could have been them and so they gave us things like clothes and furniture. I got a doll’s pram from a neighbour whose daughter had grown out of.

My father, Harry Brotherhood, was in the ARP and also worked as a gas engineer, and was always being called out to repair the gas works. After our house was destroyed, my father bought a new house a couple of miles away. Again our shelter was flooded, and we had to go and stay our neighbour’s shelter, they were called the Greenings. Once again after a night of bombing, we woke up to find that our house had been bombed out. It wasn’t very long between the two events, probably less than six months. All that was left where my bedroom had been, was a chest of drawers with a piece of the bedroom floor underneath. On the chest was a doll that I had got for my birthday. When the firemen arrived I remember pointing to my doll and one of them went to fetch it for me, but as he touched the doll, it disintegrated and fell away in his hands. I felt devastated, because once again I had lost my toys and I had nothing left. All we had left was what we were standing up in.

We did panic in the morning because we thought my father might have been in the house, because after he finished his shift he used to come in and sleep under the dining room table — he should have known better being an ARP warden! Luckily he had been called out and hadn’t been in the house, but we didn’t find out for about three hours and in the meantime we were worried sick.

It’s a strange thing — but the flooding of our shelters actually saved our lives twice!

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