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I was born at the end of 1933 in Edmonton, London. I can just about recall that teachers talked to us at school about being evacuated. Not knowing what that meant at the age of 5, I went home and told my Mum.

The next thing I remember was being at the station with all the other children. An older girl asked me to stay with her. I didn’t realise that she was quite a naughty girl. We arrived in Ponsanooth, Cornwall, and we were lined up in the playground and people came to choose us. It seemed quite a few people wanted me. Apparently, I was a cute little girl, blue eyes, and freckles with a fringe.

However, they didn’t seem to want Lily, the other girl. As she told me to say at Paddington Station, I said I wanted to be with her. Eventually, a very nice Mr and Mrs Hoffer accepted us. They lived in a brick and stone cottage with the bogs down the end of the garden. Mr Hoffer used to dig it all out during the year. I was asked to sing in the choir at the school. We used to go out for walks with Mr and Mrs Hoffer. Every Sunday we went to Chapel up a big hill and people used to be bent over walking up it. Sometimes, in the summer, we were taken for a walk where there were lots of trees with nuts, on both sides of the road. Once we ran ahead with our best Sunday clothes on and our bonnets and we tried to climb the trees — Mr and Mrs Hoffer were shocked. They used to take us to the beaches, Perranporth, Portreath and Falmouth. I remember getting very red and burnt as I had red hair and a very white skin.

My Mum and Dad used to come and see me. One day, at Falmouth, we were paddling in the sea when suddenly there were aeroplanes and then on the horizon we saw a ship blown up. It was scary.

Dad picked me up and ran with me back to the huts. When they went back to London I used to cry and cry. I went to bed still crying and Mrs Hoffer said if I didn’t stop I wouldn’t see them any more. We used to be fed on Cornish pasties, mostly filled with vegetables and maybe a small amount of meat. My Mum and Dad were worrying that I was not getting enough food. One day when Mrs Hoffer was out, Lilly and I took some apple pie up to the bog and ate it in there. Can’t remember what was said. There was no running water there in the house, we all had to walk down to the pump to fetch the water. When I was so young I thought it was a long way away, but when I revisited with my own children it was only yards away. I vaguely remember that I wanted to make friends with some children who lived the other side of the gate in a block of terraced houses. Mrs Hoffer wasn’t too pleased but she took me there to one of them. Then it was bath time and a boy was going to be bathed in the room, so I was ‘whipped away’ quickly. We visited Truro Cathedral which was very grand.

After about eighteen months I was told that my Dad was coming to take me home, back to London. I didn’t want to go and leave Mr and Mrs Hoffer. On one day when Mum and Dad came to see me they wanted me to have some photos taken at the school. I wouldn’t go with them, so that decided them then. The train going back to London was packed. Dad got a seat at one end of the carriage and I was at the other end, about six seats away. I cried and eventually they made room for me next to my Dad. I didn’t like it back in

London. The sirens went day and night and my Mum wouldn’t go down into the shelters even though there was an Anderson in the back garden. Also, we lived opposite Pymmes
Park, where there were lots of shelters, with bunk beds in them, but we never went there, instead we slept upstairs. I used to be woken up in the night with the air raid warning and then came the bombs, the searchlights, and the Ach Ach guns. I lay there very scared, then the ‘All Clear’ went — perhaps some sleep came then. I would go to school and when the sirens went we continued our lessons in the shelters and also practised putting on our gas masks. Once after school, I was told to go to this building and have my gas mask tested, I got to the building but would not go in, I was scared there might be gas, so I went home.

One night, when my Dad was on night work, I was in bed with my baby brother and an extremely loud noise came over our roof. It was so low, so noisy, with fire coming out of its tail, I thought the fire would come in our windows. I sat up in bed petrified, I could not move, my Mum came up and put her hand on my shoulder. We watched it go further away before it crashed; It was a ‘doodle-bug’ a pilot-less aeroplane.

My Mum and Frank, the baby, and myself moved back to Cornwall. This time to farmer Bourdy. He had a very big horse which we had rides on. He had twin toilets, round the back of the building, and it was a long way to walk — can’t remember much more about that visit.

Later, back in London, us children used to play out, even during the evening. When it was dark, we used to see these lights flashing across the sky and we used to count them. We did not know that those lights were the V2 rockets, they were quiet and so they didn’t scare us. One day the street was evacuated until an incendiary bomb was dealt with. It was hanging from a chimney pot. Friday mornings my Nan, who lived next door, and my Mum used to go down to the Alcayor site to the bakers and bring rolls home. They came home and said a bomb had hit the site and dress models were all over the road. By now, I had another little brother, Victor. He was born in the North Middlesex Hospital.

After the war, there was a very big street party. All us children had to take a knife and fork, which Mum said I didn’t have to bring back.

I have been back a few times to see Mrs Hoffer and she was pleased to see my family and me. Mr Hoffer died soon after the war. I still write to her, but now she is in a residential home in Falmouth: she is in her 90s. I hope to go and see her this year sometime. Lily died of diabetes.

Amen

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