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You lived at Longbridge, about 8 miles out of Birmingham - a place where everybody knows about the Rover business, known then as Austin Motors. During the war it was camouflaged so well that it looked like a forest. The German pilots that came every night couldn’t find the place.
We were in the air raid shelters every night, because there was a raid every night. One day I would come home from school, my mother sent me shopping down the road, the sirens. In the sky there were barrage balloons, you knew when there was a raid, you’d see them coming across the channel. A lady pulled me into the green grocer shop because of the sirens and an aircraft came across and dropped one bomb on the Austin. I was only a short while away but it killed one worker there, and that was the only bomb that was dropped during the war.
I was a dance student, and during the war they closed down the ballroom schools, as most people were working in the war. The forces all wanted to learn ballroom dancing because they did it in the barracks to keep them going. As I was short I had a very short RAF pilot from Iceland (we all called him little Eskimo). The other girls all seemed to have very tall men. But I was lucky to be given an orange as a gift from the officer; the other girls didn’t get anything!
My brother went into the Navy when he was 14; he went to a navel school. So when the war broke out he had to go to war. Eventually he was on a submarine he got torpedoed, he had to come out of the Navy, but went back in six months later.
We always went to the theatres most nights there was an air raid, and one Saturday night we came out of the theatre, and straight into an air raid centre which was under the main road, stayed there till five am in the morning. We sang songs, you name it we did it! The big shelters under the ground had a ‘knees up’. When we came out at 5am in the morning the actual theatre we had been to was bombed. A lot of the city ended up being bombed.
If we had to stay in our air raid shelter at home, we all had them in our back gardens. If we had to stay in all night we got half a day off of school! As soon as the sirens went at night the dog was the first to get to the air raid shelter (for coffee and biscuits!).
At school, the teachers went to the war. Woman around where I lived worked in the factories and the men went to war. If you were caught in the city and the sirens went, you automatically went underground. Even though there was a war, we didn’t take it seriously. Life wasn’t dull there was always somebody to sing or dance.

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