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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Age Concern, Dorchester on behalf of Mrs V E Charker, and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Charker fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I got married the day before war broke out. I was 25 and my husband was 30. He was a physicist and I was a kindergarten teacher. We couldn’t go away on honeymoon because of the war starting. I had given up my job because I was getting married and was not allowed to teach as a married woman. My husband was teaching Physics so he was in a reserve occupation.

We were going to live in Greenwich but his Grammar School was evacuated to Tunbridge Wells, so we had to move there. I didn’t like Tunbridge Wells because it was very difficult to get anywhere decent to live. We eventually got rooms. My first baby was born there in June 1940.

Food and other things were rationed. We managed all right — you had to. Offal was never rationed — that was a help. We were not bombed — only one flying bomb nearby. My husband taught one school in the morning and another school in the afternoon, so he had two lots of school work to correct. We used to go up to London to see my mother in Hampstead.

Our second daughter was born in 1943. Tunbridge Wells was just crammed full — so we couldn’t find better housing. Of course there was no TV, so we had to listen to the radio to find out what was going on. We used to go to the cinema occasionally and we used to walk into the country with the pram.

There was constant anxiety during the war. It was always hanging over you. Before D-Day all the lanes were full of Army vehicles — we knew something was coming.

At the end of the war we all went out in the street rejoicing with everyone else — we had heard the announcement on the radio.

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