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In 1939, when the war started, I was 8 years old and didn’t understand what was happening really but as I lived in London I experienced the air raids. The things that have stuck in my mind are the air raid sirens going when there was an air raid and being frightened. There were two types of shelter, the Morrison, which was a big steel table you could have indoors if you had room or the Anderson shelter in the garden, which was corrugated iron and was put down in the ground. My Mum and Dad didn’t have an air raid shelter so at night we often slept next door because they had a Morrison. The Wardens used to come round the streets to check that your windows were blacked out and I remember the sticky tape on the windows to stop the windows shattering if a bomb dropped.

I remember hearing guns firing at the German planes and the Doodlebugs which roared overhead. They were a flying bomb. When the engine stopped above you they used to come straight down and blow up everything below. We had a bomb drop at the back of our house one night. We were in bed asleep when the siren went off, we heard an explosion and all the windows smashed, the walls cracked and ceilings came down, there was mess everywhere. We weren’t hurt but my older sister had a baby, Geoffrey who later died at the age of ten from a blood clot on the brain, probably due to the explosion.

One day I went with my Mum on a train to go shopping. On the way home we heard guns firing at a German plane. When we came to our station we got off the train and saw the German plane coming down on fire with smoke pouring out of the tail. The pilot started firing at anybody he saw, so my Mum and I hid behind the back of a baker’s van until he went overhead. I was very frightened.

I still went to school every day and we had to take our gas masks with us in case there was a gas attack. Things were getting very dangerous so the government decided to evacuate the children to country places where they would be safer. I was evacuated to Norwich to a very nice lady and her husband. There was another girl older than me who I didn’t know. My Mum and Dad used to come and see me sometimes but I was getting very home sick and cried when they left so after 6 months I went back home. At school we used to sit in the corridors when the sirens sounded so that we were away from the windows and had to sit with a dummy in our mouth in case we bit our tongue during an explosion. I don’t think the boys’ gas masks would have worked if they needed them because they used to use them to hit each other in the playground.

My Dad was a London bus driver and saw a lot of bombing. If there was an air raid while he was driving he stopped his bus and he and the passengers went down into a shelter until the all clear was heard.

The years went on and through the war everyone had to put up with sirens, bombs, guns, blackouts, air raid wardens coming round, it was just part of everyday life then. But after five years the war came to an end and everyone went mad with excitement. There was dancing and street parties everywhere. Down the road where I lived we had a street party mostly for the children. We had tables down the middle of the street and everyone provided food or drink. It was the happiest day of my life.

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