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This story was added to the People's War Site by a volunteer from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Newcastle on behalf of Annie Joyce Anderson. Annie Joyce Anderson fully understands the site's terms and conditions and the story has been added to the site with her permission.

When I was seven in 1939, before we were evacuated and the war was in progress, we sheltered from an air raid, underneath our stairs in a down stairs flat, in Newton Street, Bensham. As the bombing got worse we were evacuated first to a manor house in Hylton. Unfortunately the gentleman became ill and we were moved to another place. There was my sister Lily aged five and my brother John aged nine, and me aged seven.

Then we were sent to Thirsk. We had to s stand on a platform and be chosen. No body wanted us; we must have appeared as little ragamuffins. Mammy said we all had to be together so in the end they took my brother and I, and my sister had to go to what she said was a witch. She cried and cried and cried and eventually she was sent to our address and my brother had to go to her address.

My brother didn’t stick it out long. Him and two mates, walked to Northallerton on the railway line, jumped on the train and hid from the guard. They jumped off at the Central Station, Newcastle, avoiding the electric lines. The railway police caught them and my mam answered the door to a little raggy boy standing with a policeman.

‘Is this your lad?’

He was filthy dirty but he was back home.

When we were evacuated we were left to be just about starve to death, we ate our meals on the kitchen chair, they were in a different room, and it always seemed to be Yorkshire curd cake — I have never eaten it since.

In the morning you used to have to break the ice on the dish to get washed. It was a small cottage with a midden at the bottom of the garden. I was terrified of it. It was a dirty, stinking place. We had an outside toilet at home but it was a flush one.

Anyway, one night a lady was cutting my hair when there was a huge bang and the windows blew out. A bomb had exploded on our school opposite. The lady cutting my hair ran out screaming so the next day I had my hair up to one ear on one side, and down to my shoulders on the other side. When we walked across the road on the next morning, our classroom was demolished and that was in Long Street, Thirsk. So much for Long Street in Thirsk for safety.

So, me mam brought us home. She said, ‘If we are going to die we will all die together in my bed.’ So when the air raid started we all got in bed with mammy.

We had been evacuated for two and a half years and the street looked really funny when we came home- we hadn’t seen it from being seven to nine and a half. But it was lovely to be home. Lovely.

My mother lived until she was 104. People knew me mam because she was a SRN/SCM, so she had brought a lot of babies into the world.

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