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When the war started everything was different, we had the blackout and everyone was called up for war work. I had to go in a factory — a munitions factory, and then we had the air aids every night. They came over and bombed London and we had the front of our house blown out, and the back. I was taking my dog for a walk on the Downs and a plane came over in the afternoon without the warning going, and I was looking at it because it was so low when all of a sudden it dive — bombed and all the bombs came down. So I lay down on the ground and the bombs went off — Boom! Boom! Boom! The plane turned over and I looked up as I was lying on the ground, and I saw the pilot, then they machine gunned and they killed a woman and her baby in a pram — that was terrible. But in the evening we heard on the news that they brought the plane down and the pilot was killed, so that was good really.

We had to do fire - watching at night, and my mother helped with that too. My brother was in the Army and he was in France. After I’d been in the factory for a while, I went nursing at the local hospital and that’s where I was throughout the war. We had lots of air raid casualties and also the soldiers came home from abroad and we had to treat them.

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