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Doreen Clayson is willing to have her story entered onto the People's War website and agrees to abide by the House Rules.

I was thirteen years old in September 1939 when war broke out. My sister was 10 years-old and we lived in Abbey Wood, a quiet village, on the edge of London and Kent.

Some months earlier my father and his friend had dug a huge hole at the bottom of the back garden into which they placed our Anderson Shelter, which was steel and shaped like an arch and earth was placed on the top and all around it.

About a week before the declaration of war, my sister and I were evacuated with my school, Kings Warren Grammar, to Maidstone in Kent. The day war was declared the air raid siren sounded, but it was a mistake.

Maidstone was not safe as we later had hit and run raids because we were so near the coast. London had not had any raids at this time and my sister, Audrey, and I were homesick, so we asked our mum to take us back and I wasn’t well as I had chilblains up to my knees and didn’t know what they were. We didn’t want to be evacuated again so we stayed in the suburbs of London.

One Saturday in September we had raids all day — the day the Battle of Britain began — and we cheered and cheered our planes that were fighting the Germans overhead. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, the barrage balloons had been taken down a short time earlier, so we knew there was something afoot. They were taken down so that our planes could go up and intercept the enemy ones.

We stayed in the Anderson shelter for hours, we being mum and dad, me and my sister. It got so damp in there that condensation was running off the walls.

My dad said that if jerry comes back tonight we’ve had it. And lo and behold we had just prepared something to eat when the siren started up and we were in the shelter all that night and many, many more nights. As soon as it was dark the sirens would sound and then all night the drone, drone, drone of the bombers and then the explosions.

We had deck chairs to sleep on at first, and then the council came and fixed us up with some bunks. I can still hear the drone of the engines of the bombers to this day.

We still went to school part-time and did our homework in the shelter.

Then we had the doodlebugs. It was fine while you could hear the engines, but when they stopped they just glided down. I was about sixteen by then and I was walking back from Sunday school one afternoon when I heard a doddlebug overhead. Then its engine cut out and it went into a steep dive. I hurried on home thinking it had fallen on our house, but it was the houses in the road behind that were hit. My mum thinking it was going to be a quiet day was just getting into the bath. All our windows and doors were blown out by the blast, and there was my mum without a stitch on.

Then we had the rockets which were very frightening. We had a dog called ‘Bonnie’ and every afternoon during the war he would walk down the garden and go into the shelter and stay in his corner all night. Then one night he wouldn’t go down there — we all went in as it was a foul night, pouring with rain — and we didn’t have a raid that night. Animals are clever; he must have had a premonition.

I thank god we all came through safely, although I never thought we would. Even after the war when the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich tested the guns. ‘Bonnie’ would go under the stairs — as the Anderson was long gone — and I had to sing the all clear for him to come out.

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