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I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD

I was 5 years old and I remember my Granddad coming to see Mum and saying war had been declared. Mum was expecting my sister at the time. Dad was in the Home Guard in Wyken Croft. We were always glad when he came home. During the air raids my Grandma, Granddad, Aunts and Uncles came to our house, not far from their own. I don’t know why. I remember them sitting round telling us stories. We had an indoor shelter and when a raid started Mum used to come into the bedroom and say “ put your siren suit on “ and my sister who was a baby at the time and myself would be put into the shelter. It was quite a while after the war that the shelter was taken away from the front room. Dad made a metal trivet to go on front of the fire and Mum always seemed to have a stew from the vegetables out of the garden and off the allotment bubbling on there. I had another sister born during the war and before we had the indoor shelter we slept in the pantry during a raid. As the water tank was over the top, if we had been hit we would have got a good soaking. I remember Dad taking me to see the Old Cathedral after it was bombed and going up Ball Hill on a bus. I remember the houses near Briton Rd were just bombed-out shells. I still remember that when I pass them now. When I first started school it was at the Parish Hall in Wyken Croft —it’s still there. Before a shelter was built at the site we had to run home when the sirens went off. Mum would meet me halfway as she had to leave my sister at home in her pram. We learnt a lot about togetherness and sharing. I was ten years old when war ended and by then was at Ravensdale School. I also remember an incendiary bomb being dropped outside our front gate and a bomb dropped in the fields at the back. Brixham Drive is there now.

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