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There were a lot of things that you had to get coupons for and one the things were matches, a mother and her toddler went into the corner shop and asked if they had any matches, and then the toddler piped up and said ‘what do you want matches for mummy, you’ve got 12 boxes at home!’

I was in the Red Cross and was in the Voluntary Aid Attachment who are substitute nurses, and was also on the YMCA mobile canteen, I was out with my friend and gave the balloon barrage the gun placements all round Brooklands and we did that twice a week. We had evacuees and one job was to de-louse evacuees heads. I also looked after a baby for my sisters who were 15 and 14 years older than I was and I looked after this baby for about 2 months then I also taught home nursing and first aid, I had classes and when we had no petrol I used to bicycle 2.5 miles down to Woking. And then came the Normandy Landing and we had London Buses fitted up for stretchers and we had to go down in the middle of the night and man one of these stretcher buses to take the wounded from the train down to the hospital at Ottershall and bicycle 2.5 miles home again. And then the war ended and I got married and went out to Ceylon and that ended my war experiences. We had the Doodle Bugs but we were very lucky as they went over us, but only one got shot down into a market garden and I asked my mother where she was and she said she sheltered in the conservatory, and I said what a place to be, full of glass!

They tried to rope me into the Land Army, a woman came to interview us and she said that I should be doing something instead of sitting on my bottom. I said that I did war work and that she was just sitting on her bottom!

I was 36 when the war broke out I’m 101 now. I trained in nursing and I helped in the Cottage Hospital and anybody who wanted help I could go and nurse them, and I looked after various people’s babies. We had young evacuees of about 7 years old, but they didn’t stay for long because they didn’t like the country. We had friends from London so we expected bombs to drop, but we were lucky not to be bombed. My brother died in the First World War. He had been in Malaysia and got very ill, so shouldn’t have gone to war and the doctor said that if the army doctor passes you I can’t stop you. So he joined the Gordon Highlanders, but he got cancer and died, but if he had lived he would have been paralysed from the waist down. He died in 1915 and I was still at school.

We had cooks, who were evacuees, but I didn’t cook and mother cooked when she could, but she had rheumatoid arthritis that stopped doing a lot of things, but she was strong willed. When she was 60 she asked my father is she could have a wheel chair and he said perhaps you could drive a baby Austin, and the yellow peril was brought up and she learned to drive, and would take the dogs up to Fox Hills up the gravel track. After that she had an Austin 10.

My happiest time during the war was looking after the babies; but there were a lot of sad moments.

We used to go up to London because a young boy I looked after, whose mother ran a bed sit establishment was there, and I didn’t want to go but a couple of weeks later we went up and she saw that he was alright. BY then the war was nearly finished and it was about 1944.

I was 23 when the war started, I was born in 1916 and I was working in the Prudential Insurance Company in London and we all volunteered and I volunteered to be a warden and if they had gas I would have to run a warn everyone (I was a good runner then). I thought how absurd it was because everyone had brown paper over their windows to stop the bombs breaking into the houses. Of course if we had been gassed they would have dropped the bombs first and broken the glass and then gassed and we all would have died anyway. Then I got married. I was terrified, we had wardens’ posts and we ran to the posts when the bombs came and one hit my friend, but she lived with me and we would sleep under my table, iron table, and she would sleep with my husband and I under the table. My brother who was only 14 thought it was great and he would put a colander on his head and tie it with string, because he wasn’t old enough to get proper gear and he would go out and help after the bombs had been dropped. After that my husband was in the TA and he and my brother had to go to war, and the next thing I knew was that they were over in Dunkirk.

Chamberlain was a good man, but people said he was a fool because he went over to German to get a peace sign, and if he hadn’t my husband would have been dead and a few more thousand men would have been too. We went to Germany to try and stop them and he came back and said peace in our time. But when my husband and brother were called up there were 400 troops and they had 4 riffles and my husband had one of the 4 and he lost one of his hands in the end and had is leg smashed by a German and laid on the beach at Dunkirk for 4 days because they had been attacked. After that he joined the Home Guards to shoot down the German planes and we lived in London and he would go to Tooting Common. He used to come home from work and change into his khaki and run down to the common, and I joined the wardens when we moved to Wallington. If he wasn’t on duty he would come with me on night duty, he didn’t mind. When the air raids happened it was terrible, we had a land mine at the end of our road.

My father didn’t like me wearing trousers, ‘it wasn’t lady like’ he didn’t mind me fighting though!

We would go to London to the theatre and there would be bombs going off.

Jehovah Witness used to call and I would argue with them because I was Christian. But they asked me if I would to have lessons, and I had heard that Jehovah Witnesses were going to live forever, that they had a special path way to heaven, so I invited them round on Tuesday evenings. So whilst I was having these lessons I can’t get bombed! They used to tell me all about it. But I found out later that a lot of these people had come from Ballham and had been bombed out, I didn’t know that when I invited them.

When I had a letter from my husband after Dunkirk, he had lost is hand so someone wrote it for him. That’s the thing that has stuck with me since the war. And my brother got our without being hurt and couldn’t be bothered to call my father to tell him he was all right. It was 3 weeks until we received a letter from him, everyone else had called their families to let them know, by the time the letter arrived my father was almost dead with worry, I fainted at the Prudential office because we all thought he was dead.

When we were on rations we only got half a pint of milk every other day, if you had ulcers you could get a pint, but I would get Alambury’s baby food from the pharmacy and make rice pudding or coco with it. We had to queue for meat, about 1 chop and 2 oz of corned beef that I would make into a casserole on Saturday’s.

When I lived in Wallington my mum lived in Clapham and 1000lb bomb was dropped at the end of her road, and I heard it in Wallington. The glass bowed out and then went back in but didn’t break. She called me up and told me what had happened and reassure me, and I told that I could hear it from where I was.

Croydon was terribly bombed and my husband would have been there as his business was based there but he hadn’t recovered from his hand injury, so he was lucky. But lots of people were killed there.

I worked for a firm of Reinforced Concrete Engineers before the war, but we were allocated to construct the Mulberry Harbour that was the temp harbour for the invasion of Europe. We were taken along to the outlay marshes of London and were told that this was out site and were told to set up a labour camp because there was the building job to be done. We set the camp up started work. We had to a dig a huge hole to make a sea wall and all the debris from London had been tipped into this site, so it stank. We thought that we would be making a floating bridge but we made concrete boxes as big a house that were floated out across the channel and sunk to make a temporary artificial harbour ready for the invasion. The biggest problem was the amount of flies, then they brought in Dettol and sprayed it everywhere to keep the flies down.

There was a factory up stream from us that got bombed on occasion, but we were lucky not to get attacked but we could see what was going on at the factory. It was quite scary at the time.

I wasn’t in the Army but was commandeered by the MOD as a contracting company and we were taken all over the country.

I went up to London from Dorking where I lived and had to get across to Dagenham that was scary because there were so many raids going on. There was an aircraft factory in Kingston so in Dorking we would get a lot of anti aircraft fire to keep the Germans away and there were a couple of occasions were the windows were blown out. We got a lot of evacuees from London and they were allocated around the residents, but the funny thing was that their parents would come down at the weekends to pick them up and take them back to London for the weekend. Defeated the object really.

We were allocated our ration books and we used them and my wife would use them to out best advantage, but we grew our own vegetables. Alcohol and cigarettes were rationed too, but it didn’t bother us. But we generally did ok with what we had.

I was a member of the Home Guard, and would Turn Out with them to patrol for Gerries. Nothing untoward happened when I was in the Home Guard though. We were told to evacuate the aircraft factory in Kingston and disburse them all, and they commandeered any factories they could, and the safest place was near the quarries. We built a temp factory in an old quarry.

We had relatives on the South Coast and their children came to live with us when the coast was barricaded. They would come out and collect blackberries. We would have blackout times, and the warden would come round a say that a slither of light could be seen and he’d tell you cover it up. We could hear planes a lot of the time, but they would synchronise their engines to defeat the radar so there was a huge roar of engines. We had the odd stray bombs when they would decide to drop the bombs and get out quick because there was a huge anti aircraft barrage around London.

If we needed to get to London I would use my car and had petrol rations. In those days the traps had an underground slot in the middle of the rail and on one occasion I remember my brakes on the car were operated by cable and it broke and dropped down in the slot and I heard a big bang and realised what was happening, after the flash and the bang.

I joined the Land Army in a village in North Lancashire because I had to look after my mother near there. All I started doing was picking apples, but by the end of I was doing the same as the men, castrating lambs and milking cows using the machine then I would have to wash the milking machine that was in a building over the court yard. I would have to carry hot water across the yard and clean it thoroughly. The farmer was very kind and he would invite me to ham teas when their relatives would visit, so that was a treat. I would also harness the carthorse and take it down to the field to collect the hay cart and the farmer’s son would come with me, and one day he was in the stable with me harnessing the horse and I was talking to the horse while I was harnessing and little Joey asked me if he had answered!

I had to have an operation because things weren’t right inside. I had had twins and twins are not on either side of my family, and I got a tumour and no one was sure if the tumour caused the twins of the twins caused the tumour. I had one poorly twin but he thrived in the end and rowed in the Cambridge’s second boat.

I wasn’t in Lancashire for the whole war; I went to work with a friend on a farm in Devon, he had a lot of poultry and he would record which hen would lay the eggs and then breed from those hens. He had ducks too and the ducks laid their eggs in a stream so it was difficult to record. He had a daughter who would come round with me, so she said she would go in the stream to get the eggs out because she had wellies and they didn’t leak. We had no bombs in Devon and on my days off I would go to Newton Abbott because you could get mock cream teas! I was 19 when the war started. I also worked in London for a while in the National Gallery, and they would give meals to anyone connected to the war. We couldn’t get much but we got sausages. We got all sorts of people in to help.

With a friend we would drive in a van up the hills behind Lancaster called the Trough of Bollam near Clitherow. They put lights up there to try to make the bombers not go over Lancaster, and we would go up there and take chocolate and buns with us to give to the men. You had to double de-clutch to get into reverse and it got stuck, and I was by myself and had to drive 2 miles in reverse, it was worth it as the men were so grateful.

In our cottage we had to pump water from a well, and the village hall more or less in the garden and I dreaded village hall nights! There was a big farm where will collected the milk and the family there had a lot of children and they didn’t have much money and I would but their sweet ration from them to help them out and I loved sweets and couldn’t get enough.

We were told that we should eat a lot of carrots to help us see in the dark, but it really meant that radar had been invented and we said that to through of the Germans.

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