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I was thirteen when war was declared and, apart from two short periods of evacuation, lived with my family in London throughout the war.
The Blitz was frightening, and all of us except my Dad had to be dug out of our wrecked house in April 1941. But, for me, living under a blanket of flying bombs in ’44 was more terrifying. Living in Battersea, we had our fair share and, although we had a small brick shelter in the back yard, it wasn’t big enough for Mum, Dad, my sister and me to sleep in. My brother had been called up, and was somewhere in France with the invasion force.
Most of the streets had large brick shelters with a number of two-tier bunks. The one opposite our home could accommodate about twelve, so, when the siren went in the evening, we took our books, newspapers and knitting, and settled in for the night. I was allocated a top bunk which I hated; I always felt safer below ground.
Sunday, July 16th had been a lovely warm day. There had been a couple of sirens during the hours of daylight and some bombs had fallen on Battersea. We listened to the nine o’clock news at home and then took up residence in the shelter. The siren sounded again, and it was a noisy night with not much sleep for any of us until the all clear went around four o’clock.
Mum and Dad had already left the shelter to get ready for work when the alert sounded again just after six. I was very sleepy and not taking too much notice of the gunfire when the buzz of a bomb penetrated my drowsiness just after six thirty. There was a stirring of bodies on the other bunks — we were all awake. I wished I had got down from the bunk; I now felt cold and very frightened. The bomb was overhead; a couple more seconds and the danger would be past. We all held our breath. There was not a sound in the shelter, and then the silence was complete: the engine had cut out and the bomb was on its way down. I put my hands over my head, and tried to burrow into the mattress. Within seconds, there was an ear-splitting bang and I found myself on the floor with books, handbags, pillows and blankets. The wooden door of the shelter crashed in along with various bits of debris and clouds of dust which stung our eyes and made us cough. As soon as everything stopped flying and shuddering, we scrambled our way outside, afraid of what we might find.
The houses adjacent to the shelter were still standing, but minus windows and doors, and with gaping holes in the roofs. The bomb had dropped about seventy yards down the road, and all that could be seen was a pall of dust stretching from one side of the road to the other, blotting out the scale of damage to the houses there. I immediately felt a sense of relief: it wasn’t us. As we turned to cross the road to home, Mum came stumbling out of the gap where the front door had been. The door was lying in the hall, all the windows had gone, some of the ceilings upstairs had come down, and there were a couple of holes in the roof with slates missing. The worst thing of all was the glass and debris that covered everything. But the fact that, apart from a few cuts and bruises, none of us had been injured was something to be really thankful for.

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