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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by Callington U3A — Meg Bassett — on behalf of Mrs Kath Pascoe who fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

My name is Mrs Kathleen (Kath) Pascoe and I was born seven years before the outbreak of War in Mousehole, a small village on the coast of Cornwall, near Penzance. I was an only child during those early years, my brother being fourteen younger than me, and my mother and I shared a house with my grandparents while my father was serving overseas in India and Burma. I went to the primary school in Mousehole until the age of eleven, when I passed the scholarship and went to Penzance Grammar School. I remember hearing War had been declared. I was out for a walk with a friend, when someone who had their radio on in their house came out to tell us the news.
Fortunately we did not have much bombing in Mousehole but strangely enough, one day an enemy ‘plane shelled Mousehole Island, just offshore, from end to end, probably thinking it was a ship! Then one of our ‘planes came along and shot-up the enemy. We were all hanging out of the window, cheering! At first, when we thought we might be bombed, we used to go under the stairs, but my Gran decided it was safer to get a proper shelter so we had a table shelter (Morrison). When the siren went we crept inside until the all-clear went. At other times, of course, we ate our meals off the table. We were lucky, but I do remember a bomb was dropped between the village of Paul and Mousehole. I can well remember the time Plymouth was blitzed — say 1940-1941 — because we could see the reflection of the blaze in the night sky.
We had no particular problems with food, and got our meat from a butcher called Cyril Jasper. Like everyone else, we had our ration, and because my grandparents lived with us, we had a bit more to go around. Like everything else, clothing was in short supply but my father sent me pure silk underwear from India in such beautiful colours of pink and green. I still have the leather handbag he sent to my mother, with a hand-tooled picture of the Taj Mahal. I cannot imagine how he managed to send these things home! Like many children whose fathers were away during the War, mine seemed a stranger to me when he did come home. It made relationships difficult for so many families.
My two uncles were in the Navy, serving on M.T.Bs and they would go out after raids to pick up any survivors. We had the only telephone in Mousehole and we used to call out the lifeboat. My grandfather would fire off the maroons — two for the lifeboat and one for the coastguard. These maroons were like large mushrooms and sat in our back garden.
American troops were based in Penzance, leading up to D-Day. Sometimes they would come into Mousehole and one day a battalion marched through the town. Of course, they were given cups of tea. At the top of Reginnis Hill, in Mousehole, there was a big artillery battery and you could hear them banging away because enemy aircraft would come in over Mounts Bay.
So even a small Cornish fishing village was not untouched by all that was happening in the rest of the world, and difficult to imagine nowadays.

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