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My most vivid, earliest memory of the War is of overnight, overcrowded train travel from Scotland, where I spent my first years and where my Grandparents lived — blinds drawn down and in dim blue lights, surrounded by khaki figures, packs and rifles. My Mother somehow managed to keep myself, my sister, our spaniel puppy and our luggage all together and safe on these journeys — even on one occasion huddled together on a blacked out Peterborough platform whilst an air raid was in progress.

My Father was a professional soldier ( I don’t remember seeing him until I was six years old) and my Mother was a nurse and was at one time posted to a Hospital in Essex (Colchester, I think) and had managed to rent a farm bungalow, in a tiny rural community- she was a great one for keeping the family together.

There were no shops anywhere near- groceries were brought round in an old, travelling van, fitted up inside with temporary shelves. Milk was delivered by a horse drawn, Roman chariot type vehicle and was dished out from churns in measuring ladles.

Food was rationed of course, and we kept rabbits to augment our meat supply — It took me a while to work out why my pets kept disappearing!

I can remember sitting on the back step at night, with my sister, watching a ‘plane caught in searchlight beams and hearing the constant bark of the guns —this was a regular occurrence.

Essex appeared to be on the direct route for bombers, V1’s etc to London, and we had a Morrison shelter (a sort of indoor, reinforced ‘cage’) actually in the front room.
Into this we regularly went — me with a large bowl for company, as I was a nervous child and the drone of the overhead engines often made me sick.

The V1 situation got increasingly worse and we and the other families in the row of took to huddling over the lane, in an improvised shelter — a concrete lined, deep drainage culvert.
Providently, we were all there when a V1 flying bomb dropped in the field at the bottom of our garden and blew a block built coalbunker clean through our bungalow, demolishing everything except the (empty) Morrison shelter!

I recently went back to this community, to find, that it hadn’t changed that much at all. The drainage culvert where we cowered on that night was still there, and, looking at the row of farm bungalows, the post war rebuilding of our old home was obvious.
I looked across the fields and was most surprised to see that the village school could be seen, quite close —certainly not more than a mile or so away. One of my happier memories of that time was coming home from school across the fields and through a sweet chestnut copse — it seemed to take us forever! I suppose that, even in those relatively dangerous times, we children were allowed a freedom that today’s young boys and girls are denied.

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