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This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Helen Churchill for Three Counties Action, on behalf of Laura Churchill, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was born in September 1940 at Hatfield in Hertfordshire.

It is strange that when I try to think back, all memories seem to be in black and white, like an old movie. I try to understand why this would be and the only answer that I come up with is that there did not seem to be much colour. Everything seems dark.

The Battle of Britain was raging overhead and we slept under a Morrison Shelter, which was like a big cast iron table. I was born under it, and the family did eat their meals seated around it.

The curtains at the window had been died black to stop the light from being seen from outside, although the electric lighting was not very bright anyway. Outside the window, about a foot away from the house, a brick wall had been erected. It was about five feet high and six feet long. The object of this was to protect the window from the bomb blast. All of the neighbouring houses had them. Small wonder that it all seemed so dark.

Hatfield was the home of the De Havilland Aircraft Company and therefore a prime target. All of the big buildings were painted in camoflage, dark green and khaki.

The local primary school was at the end of our road, and an air-raid shelter ran along the back of the playing field. In later years this became a very exciting place to play. In one of the gardens that backed onto the field, there was the fuselage of an aeroplane, which was used as a garden shed! There were a few of these about.

There was an army camp in a field nearby and often in the evenings there would be soldiers in our house playing darts and billiards.

My actual memories of the war are obviously few, but I do clearly remember the street party and the bonfire when it was all over, the delight with which we knocked down the brick wall, and being given the blackout curtains to make a ‘tent’ with.

Gradually, the factories were restored to whites and creams and with my first holiday at the seaside, colour came into my life.

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