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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Louise Treloar of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team from Mrs Hilary Clarke on behalf of the Longstone Local History Group, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

The memories are taken from a special edition of a newsletter kindly submitted by Longstone Local History Group. It was edited by Liz Greenfield and published in Autumn 2002. Longstone was a village which sheltered evacuees and was comparatively unaffected by air attack, although the night sky was often lit by the fires of the Sheffield Blitz.

I came to live at the Woodlands near Thornbridge Hall with my mother and father at the beginning of the war. Mr Boot was our landlord, and I remember him coming to collect the rent. He had a little goatee beard and he wore tweeds. Some land girls worked at the Hall and my mother got very friendly with them. I had a Mickey Mouse gas mask, which I carried in a brown cardboard box over my shoulder. I hated having it forced over my face when we practised using it. My greatest diversion was watching the trains come in, seeing all the people getting on and off, and the lovely colourful station garden. Our neighbours were the Gilberts and I thought Reg Gilbert looked very dashing in his RAF uniform; he took me sledging down a steep hill nearby and terrified me. I also went haymaking with his father, which I loved, even though I felt sorry for the scuttling rabbits! My father was in the army and when he was home from leave he would take me on rides down the drive on the back of his bike. One day, out of the blue, my Scottish grandmother appeared on the doorstep; she wanted to see her daughter and granddaughter. A day or so later a telegram boy came with the news that my father, who was 33, had died of typhus in North Africa.

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