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September 1939, all the children in our area of East London were being evacuated. My brother and I were put on a train with lots of other children from our school. I was 10 and a half and my brother was 6. We didn’t know what was going on but I knew I didn’t want to go. We were going to a place called Stratton St Margaret in Swindon. When we got there we went to a school hall and there were a lot of people there. All the children were being allocated to families and right at the last we went to a family but we didn’t like it so I went to a Billeting Officer asking to be moved. Nobody wanted a boy and a girl in our age group so we were split up. My brother went to one family and I went to another. We were not far apart and my brother stayed there throughout the war.

Our father’s firm got bombed and he was transferred to Avonmouth. I went back to London to be with Mum. The bombing got so bad that we spent all night every night in the shelter at the bottom of the garden. We left the shelter one morning only to be told that we had to leave the house, due to a land mine landing on some open ground at the back of the house. We were lucky it never went off. We had to go and stay with my Aunt Nell in Dagenham. Very often we would be caught in an air raid whilst visiting home and would have to go down the underground shelters. As long as you didn’t sit in anyone’s place people would be very sociable and we would sing songs to pass the time as you never knew what time you would get home.

Dad wrote to say what a nice place Avonmouth and Shirehampton was. At this time there was very little bombing so he persuaded us to join him so we packed our things in a big lorry. I’ll never forget the journey, Mum and I sat in the back on our settee and it took about 8 hours ( no motorway ). I remember going down this road with big cliffs on one side and a river on the other, no houses in sight. The driver said not far now and Mum looked at me and said we are in the middle of nowhere!

The peace we hoped for never lasted long and all around Bristol and the outskirts were being bombed. Mum said ‘ Hitler had knew we had moved’.

We used to visit my brother as often as we could. We were coming back from visiting him in Swindon when Bristol was having one of it’s big raids, we had not been in Bristol long so I didn’t know what station we had stopped at but we had to get off the train. I remember we did a lot of walking and it was very frightening , we walked down a road with all the shops on fire, everything was burning. The mannequins in clothes shops were melting, there was glass everywhere and flying sparks. I cannot remember any bombs dropping so it must have been a tail end of the raid but I can remember the hosepipes all over the place and firemen shouting ‘you cant go that way’. I think it took us nearly all night to get home.

We had some funny things happen to us as well as the bad. We sometimes went over to my Uncle’s in East Ham. He never had a shelter, he used a cellar. Part of which was used as a coal hole which was in the front garden. Once when we were there the siren went off and we went down the cellar, shut the door and locked ourselves in. Mum said for me to go up through the main hole and as you can guess I got stuck and people were laughing. There was a lot of pulling and tugging, eventually they got me free.

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