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September 1939 — I started Junior School carrying my gas mask. Children had arrived from London and were taken round to houses in my road to try to find homes for them; we had a little boy and girl. My mother prepared a meal which included runner beans and she was told in no uncertain terms ‘we don’t eat grass in London’.

I can recall standing under the viaduct in Gordon Road and seeing trainloads of soldiers shouting and waving — they were so dirty. My dad told me that they were back from Dunkirk.

Soon the London bombing could be heard (and seen) most nights and the sky was red. Our local fire brigade was drafted to London and my friend’s father stayed up there for many weeks relieving the London firemen. The bombing brought even more evacuees and, as many of the original children had returned home we now had a mother and baby who had been bombed out. I was most annoyed, they took my new dolls pram for the baby and I never got it back!

My parents came from the Midlands and it seemed to me that when airmen were posted to RAF Naphill (Bomber Command HQ) many of them came to our house for a break, they brought news of what was happening to Birmingham and Coventry.

As I grew older my Saturdays were spent queuing for ‘off ration’ items in the town. By then the Americans had come into the war and Wycombe Abbey was the HQ of the 8th Air Force. Imagine the shock the Co-op queue got one week when a group of American soldiers marched past on their way from the station to the Abbey. Some were BLACK! We had never seen a black man before, only in books.

As for the bombing, Wycombe was lucky, although we had factories making Mosquito planes and tanks, the fact that we were in a deep valley meant that we only got stray bombs. We often watched Spitfires doing ‘victory rolls’ up the valley — we children just stood and cheered.

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