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This story has been submitted to the People’s War Website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Nellie Eliza LeFeuvre and has been added to the site with her permission….

I was around 5 when the war started and at Infant School in Ashford Middlesex. I recall that we used slates and chalk as paper was in short supply, indeed when I went to Junior school at 7 we didn’t have a lot of books, we shared. We had a shelter underground at the school; the top was covered in grass so it was well disguised.

I was the seventh of eight children, so mum was kept very busy looking after all of us and trying to cope with the rationing. Father was in the Police and worked for the War Department in some way or other, it was all very hush hush, so he never talked about it, but I do know that he had to carry a gun. He was also very good at making us toys.

At home we had an Anderson shelter in the garden and I remember we would have to sleep in it on occasions. From our bedroom window we would watch the searchlights lighting up the sky, searching out the German bombers. Then in the mornings we would go and pick up the shell cases strewn all over the ground.

Sometimes we had German POW in the area, they were helping to build and repair the roads, as children we sort of got to know them although they didn’t speak English and sometimes some of the mothers would occasionally make them things, rationing permitting.

We weren’t far from London and we could see the aircraft coming down and sometimes the sky would be filled with incendiary bombs.

Two of my brothers went into the services the eldest one in the Fleet Air Arm on an aircraft carrier and the next one went into the Royal Navy.

After all these years I still have my gas mask and ration books.

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