大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from Age Concern, Dorchester on behalf of Lady Sara Grayson (nee Upton), and has been added to the site with her permission. Lady Sara fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

鈥淚 was born in 1937. I was 2 when the war started. We lived in the South of France until the summer before the war started. Then we lived in Finchley Road, London in my grandfather鈥檚 house. My grandmother decided that we would be safer out of London, so we moved to Hove. Then my grandmother rented a big house at East Farndon near Market Harborough, Leicestershire where my aunt and cousins joined us, her husband being away in the Navy. The Home Guard did exercises in the courtyard and stables. The Womens鈥� League of Health and Beauty used our dining room for their meetings. The Red Cross did a practice emergency and lowered a girl over a balcony in a canvas sling. I was given a nurse鈥檚 uniform.

All the German bombers going to bomb Coventry flew over. My grandmother had bombed out people from Coventry in the rooms over the stable. I was about three and a half years old. We kept pigs called Percy and Prudence who had to go to market. My mother had to go and work in London, either at the Foreign Office or the War Office. Basically my grandmother brought me up. My father, a journalist, stayed in France. My mother died of TB when I was four and my grandmother brought me up. There were Italian prisoners of war and we used to wave to them.

We moved to Petworth, Sussex. There were lots of Canadian troops. We used to see convoys of them. My grandmother used to have some of them to supper to make them feel more at home. My granny and me got under the dining room table when a doodlebug came over. I wasn鈥檛 particularly frightened.鈥�

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