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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Matthew Smaldon on behalf of June Turner and Victoria Turner. It has been added to the site with their permission. Mrs Turner fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

‘During the war I lived in Hastings, in Ore village. It was a Sunday morning, and we had the radio on, and it was announced that we were at war with Germany. I remember my father had to go off and report, as he was going to be in the ARP, and my mother was crying because of the fear of what the war would do to her family. My father was in the rescue party - he used to rescue people from bombed buildings after air raids. My father was a painter and decorator, and he had been out of work for much of the 1930s, due to the recession and ill health, but the war meant that for the first time he had a full time job, and was employed, in the rescue party. Three of my sisters were in the Women’s Land Army. My eldest sister Win was also engaged with fire watching in the evenings, watching for incendiary bombs. Because I was the middle daughter, and my older sisters were away, I had to take care of the younger children. So if we were playing near the house and the siren went, I had to get everybody in doors, quickly, to take shelter.

Quite a number of bombs dropped on Hastings. At one point a bomb dropped in the field behind our house, and the ceilings came down. The bedroom ceilings had to be re-plastered. We didn’t have an air raid shelter as such. We had what was called a rescue room, or a blast room. My father had seen people who were in shelters, who had actually died because of perhaps a direct hit on shelters in the garden. Because of this we had a reinforced room within the house instead. It had tree trunks up and beams across the ceiling, and a brick wall built just outside the window. It was called a blast wall. In fact, it took out all the daylight, as there was just a foot between the wall and the window itself, and wall was up to above window level.

We were not allowed to go down into Hastings, because for quite a time the seafront was blocked off because of the threat of invasion on this part of the coast.

At Northseat, a high point behind our house, there was a prisoner of war camp, where the prisoners of war who used to work on the farms were held. They were Italians mostly. I remember seeing them when I went for a walk up there.

The war made it very different, with regard to going to school. At the beginning of the war, it was thought that the south coast would be safe, so evacuees came to us from London. Which meant, immediately, that we had to go on to half time schooling. It was then realised that the south coast was a danger zone, because of the likelihood of invasion. So the evacuees were moved, and schools in Hastings were also evacuated. It meant that for quite a time I didn’t go to school at all. Because so many people were evacuated from Hastings, for quite a time the schools were closed. When they reopened, it was for one session, either mornings or afternoons only, because the school was what was called an emergency school. When the schools reopened on part time basis my mother said ‘Right, you’ve got to go to school’, we couldn’t really see why we should. It didn’t occur to us, at the age of ten, that it really was compulsory.

Due to rationing, there were quite a few things you didn’t see anymore. My small brother, who was born in 1941, hadn’t seen a banana before, and at the end of the war when he was given one, he tried to eat it with the skin on. Because we were a big family, rationing of some things didn’t affect us so badly. If you are making a pot of tea, three spoonfuls of tealeaves will do for the whole family, and we all received a ration. So sometimes we could give my grandmother, who was living on her own, a packet of tea that we didn’t use. My father dug the lawn up so that fresh vegetables could be grown. He also had an allotment near our home. We had a healthy diet, very little meat of course. There were some black market activities in Hastings, but only among those who could afford it. We were a working class family, in a working class area, and we just didn’t have the money to hoard.

My cousin got married during the war. Her husband had three days embarkation leave, as he was going to be sent abroad. So they got married and had three days honeymoon. Three weeks later she received a telegram to say he was dead. She was a bride and widowed within three weeks.

We always heard the news on the radio, every evening. We rarely went to the cinema, as it was two miles away in the centre of Hastings, and we didn’t want to be down there during the blackout. My father used to enjoy listening to Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce, the traitor who broadcast for the Germans. One evening he said ‘The people of Hastings are sitting in darkness tonight because German bombs have destroyed their power station’, and we were sitting there with the light on, so that gave us a good laugh.

The thing I hated most was evacuation. I really hated it. First of all, they decided to evacuate all mothers and children from Hastings. I think this was in September 1940. We went to Somerset, to a village called Kilmersdon, near to Frome. I was with my mother and five brothers and sisters. When we got there, they found it difficult to billet us anywhere, because there were so many of us. On the way there the trains were bombed, there were no toilets on the train; it was in complete darkness going through the night and often stopping. It was an absolutely awful journey. We were finally sent to a farmhouse, and the woman didn’t want us, and said ‘You’re not welcome here’ and my mother walked us back into the village and said ‘Put us somewhere else’. So we were then split up into two groups, and we went to another lady who was very kind to us. After about six weeks, my mother came back to Hastings to find my father. By now the bombing had started. My father, working in the rescue party, was always a nervous man, and he was in such a state that my mother said ‘Right, that’s it, we are all going home’ so she came back to Somerset and took us all back to Hastings. Later on, I was evacuated because at the age of 11 I passed the 11-plus and got a scholarship. I was sent to Ware on my own, then my younger sister joined me, but I hated every minute of it and I came back and went back to the emergency school, until the High School came back to Hastings.

The lady next door to us had only one eye, because as a child she had been pushed down some stone steps and lost it then. Like my mother, she had an extremely large family, and a real sense of humour. Because we had double British summertime, it stayed light late, so we used to sit outside in the garden and she used to tell us tales of her childhood. She would always have a comment about the war, and what she was going to do to Hitler when she got hold of him. I remember her with affection.

One day a bomb dropped on the laundry of the local hospital, and it burst open all the feather pillows, so the whole of Ore village was covered in feathers. And I remember one of our neighbours was an extremely fat lady, really obese. We had a table in our hall, and one day when the bombs were dropping this lady got frightened and tried to hide under the table. Well, she got stuck, and my mother had a job to get her out!

At the end of the war, I was 14. It was our school speech day, we were in the White Rock Theatre, and the head teacher was giving her report, giving prizes and so on. We knew the end of the war was coming near, and somebody came onto the platform with a piece of paper, handed it to the headmistress, who read it and then said ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have to declare the war in Europe is now over.’ It was one of the most dramatic moments of my life. She then said ‘We will now rise and sing the national anthem, and then we will all go home, as speech day is now over.’ When we went outside, the local bus company, Maidstone & District, had all the buses waiting for us. And as we drove home, we saw in Old London Road, someone had fixed up a V for Victory in flashing Christmas lights in their window.’

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