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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Diana Wilkinson of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Mrs Maureen Hosford and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was just 3 years old when war broke out, I was living north of Gatwick airport. There was also an airport in Croydon and Canadian RAF base nearby so we were used to aeroplanes flying quite low over our house. One day my younger sister and I were playing in the garden when a plane came really low, we could see the pilot so we waved, it was only afterwards that we knew that we were waving at a German who was off to drop a bomb! We were young and innocent and didn’t realise the seriousness of the war.

My younger sister and I were not evacuated, only children who were going to school were moved away so my elder sister and brother could’ve gone but my mother didn’t want us to be separated so we all stayed at home. Only one of the children I knew who lived near us was evacuated all the others stayed with their families.

I remember an incendiary bomb being dropped on the woods nearby which set fire to the trees and my sister and I sat in armchairs waiting to go if necessary — I’m not sure where we would’ve gone but we were ready.

All our neighbours used to come into our house when there was bombing as they lived in wooden houses and thought that they would be safer in our brick built house, of course they wouldn’t have been!

When the bombs were falling before we had an air raid shelter we had to sleep in a double bed in the sitting room or hide in the cupboard under the stairs. Eventually the air raid shelter arrived, it fitted into our living room, it had a metal top and mesh sides — we played on the roof during the day and slept inside it at night.

I remember being so ill that I had to stay in bed, even though it was summer I had a fire in the bedroom. Even though the bombs were dropping, I had to stay in bed — I remember the doodlebugs very well — if you could hear them you were OK. I had a chill in my kidneys which was probably caused by sitting in a damp shelter at school, I can remember water running down the walls.

My father was away for 6 years — he was in the 8th Army in the desert, in all that time he only returned once for 2 weeks and when us children saw him we didn’t think that he was our father — he was so sunburnt we thought that he was a black man! He was moved to Germany at the end of the war, he didn’t come home when the war ended and would never talk about what he had been doing but years later I found out some information that suggests he could’ve been releasing prisoners from the prisoner of war camps.

I remember the celebrations at the end of the war — we sang and danced in the street and then had wonderful street parties.

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