大象传媒

This story was submitted to the people鈥檚 War site by Bernice Quaife from The Folkestone School For Girls and has been added to the website on behalf of Anne Lee with her permission and she fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was born in Scotland and my earliest memory is when I was staying with my auntie in Edinburgh. My father travelled down to Kent to work in the mines. After he got a job and a house he sent for mother and us children. I then travelled down from Scotland with my brother, sisters and my mum on a night train.
On September 3rd, when the war broke out, I was 9 years old and was in church and when I came out the siren was going and we was told that the war had started. Us children started to run home and on the way I lost my pocket money. It was only pennies to buy sweets, but I was too afraid to go back and look for it. When I got home my mother was busy sticking brown paper on the top part of the windows, so the light would not show out and if any lights were showing at night a warden would knock on the door.
The first school I went to was in Shepherd鈥檚 Well. We moved to Elmton Lane. Then I went to school between Eythorne and Elvington. It was a wooden building but we couldn鈥檛 go there until they built shelters. Meanwhile, we had to share the school in Eythorne. When they finished building the shelters, we returned back to our original school, but when the air raid warning came up they rang the school bell and we then had to run to the shelters. They always had water and biscuits in there for us and we were told to take our books and pencils with us, but some forgot, therefore the teachers would read to us. The planes came every night about 9 o鈥檆lock, when it started to get dark The noise from the engines was indescribable and very different from the English planes. There was a slack heap, not so far from where I lived, and I think it was a landmark for the planes because it was burning all the time and would flare up.

We had ration cards every Monday and I would do the shopping for the week and carry it all in one bag. It was very little butter; margarine, sugar and cheese, but my mother never took the sugar because she gave it to us kids. My mother kept chickens, which we used for the eggs and ate the chickens only at Christmas, as it was a special time. My father kept allotments, upon which he use to grow vegetables, and I had to help weed the carrots and vegetables when they needed weeding. The main vegetables we used to eat were cabbage, carrots and potatoes and this was our main diet, and we had to eat it because there was nothing else.
The planes and guns were rather frightening for us children. They would be going every night when the planes came over and the next morning there would be shrapnel everywhere. One of the fighter planes that came down, not far from us, started exploding during the Battle of Britain and landed in a field and all of us children started to run towards it. Our parents started to scream to come back, when the bullets fired out of the plane and the plane started to explode.

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