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I was born in 1932 so that made me 6 when the war broke out and I can remember the announcment of the war. I jumped up and down like kids do, and thought, "Ooh, there's going to be guns and that. How exciting!" My dad called me to one side and said, "It won't be easy. It won't be easy at all, and don't ever let me catch you doing things like that again." Well, immediately after that, the air raid siren went, then we had the Civil Defence come round with rattles that were supposed to be used to give warnings for gas, and we all panicked and shot under the stairs. My brother was only 2 and he was in one of these gas¬masks which lie down flat. It had a little perspex window and there was a pump at the side which mothers were supposed to pump up and down to let the baby breathe. Later on, when they got older, they went into the Mickey Mouse ones. However, it was a false alarm and there wasn't actually an air raid.

Later on during the war I lived in Southend-on-Sea. When we arrived there, children were running all over the place, and I remember my mother saying firmly, "We'll all sit together." My father was too old for the armed forces in this war, the Second World, so he joined the AFS, Auxiliary Fire Service, and they moved us out into the wilds of Ashingdon into an old house - a bungalow, rather - that had been empty for years. It was about 3 or 4 miles from the nearest station at Rochford where there was a newly built hospital. Actually they were still building part of it when the war started. My sister was born in 1940 there. Anyway, we lasted there for just over a year and then they allowed our family to move in nearer to where the station was in Rochford. We were worse off there because we had Rochford airport (which is now Southend airport), where all the Spitfires gathered, we had a railway line not far away from us and were near the RAF station, so we were in the centre of the acction. There was the hospital behind us with this enormous chimney - which now has a preservation order on it - and actually the hospital was bombed. The Germans didn't believe it was the hospital and the pilots had been instructed that it was a factory, not a hospital at all. The only casualties were 2 German pilots who had previously been shot down and were being treated for their injuries in a newly completed wing which happened to be the only part hit.

We went to school and at the time they built the brick, above ground shelters, right next to the railway line. We were supposed to cross over the road, walk up the road to this field, and walk through the field to the shelters, and we suddenly realised we were right close to the railway line. Next thing they did, they closed the school and we went to people's houses. So one week we'd be in Mrs. So-and-So's house and we would have our lessons and they would give us homework to do, and the next week it would be somebodys else's house. There would be about 15 or 16 children all crammed into somebody's front room! That's how we carried on there but we lost quite a bit of schooling.

After that, my father was stationed at a place called Prittwell, by The Bell pub, where a row of shops had been taken over and made into their fire-station. By then he was in the National Fire Service as they had lumped all the fire services together. It wasn't voluntary - if they were a ceertain age, they were told they had to go in the Civil Defence or whatever, so he went to the Fire Service. During that time he disappeared for 3 days when they bombed Corryton oil refinery, and we hadn't a clue where he was. My sister had just been born and my mother was in a right state. He had been at the refinery all the time as the blaze was huge and gave the Germans a good guide to London. That was the worst one for us, when they bombed Corryton and the oil refinery. We didn't realise how dangerous it was until later. I had an older half-brother who was in the Forces with the Norfolk Regiment and he got his trigger finger - his index finger - shot off when he was on these sort of tractors like troop carriers. He was then invalided out, so they put him into Civil Defence and he was up in London all during the Blitz. We never saw him for days and weeks because he was driving an ambulance through the rest of the war.

When my father was allowed to go back to Southend, to Prittwell rather, they allowed the rest of us to move back to Westcliff. The streets were practically empty with only a few families and key-workers around. You couldn't get down to the beach because that was all HMS Westcliff and the whole beach was cordonned off with lots of barbed wire, and there were cookhouses and ablution blocks all along the promenade. There were a lot of empty houses but there were a few people there -a milkman, a baker, a chap who did plumbing, a couple of teachers, and there were one or two schools. I went off to St. Helen's School in Westcliff, a Catholic school. We were a mixture there. We had the Lewis family who had a big shoe store in Hamlet Court Road which was rather a posh shopping area then. They were Jewish and they were very good. We had the Rossi family, famous for ice-cream in Southend. We had a whole selection of people. From where I lived, it took us about 20 minutes to walk to school. We were very fortunate there because on one of these days that were Obligations and therefore was a holiday (I think it was called Corpus Christi, but I'm not sure), the school was bombed and we could have been there. When we got up the next day someone said, "The school's been bombed and the convent school next door." The bomb had landed in a reservoir but the unfortunate thing was that they also hit some private houses and one of these was where the WRNS were billeted. There were 3 girls and, I think, 1 fellow killed. But it could have been a lot more if we had been in school. We had glass partitions in our school and they just got blown out, and there were huge lumps of masonry just hanging off the top. There was an angel made of oak that used to be perched on top of St. Helen's church and that got blown off. Earlier they had also hit the other school, Hamlet Court Road school, and flattened it, but that was at a different time, over a weekend. After that hapened, then we had the influx of all the children from there, so in the end we had Greek Orthodox, Jewish people, Church of England, all sorts of people all mixed up together. So it gave me a good grounding in knowing what they now call ethnic minorities so you can accept their life and customs. We were taught also what their religions stood for so all that was a good thing, the only good thing that came out of the war, I suppose.

My aunt was in a sanatorium in Westcliff - she'd been directed in there as a telephonist but she couldn't spell for toffees. And there were doctors phoning saying that this person had diptheria, this one's got rubella, or other things, and she couldn't spell them so in the end they put her on the ward and in the end she became a nurse. She was quite a character, she was. They were allowed to go to the pictures and she used to take us. We were going to the pictures one day when an air raid started and there was shrapnel falling all over the place. Some chap grabbed her arm and shouted, "Get in there." There was a tunnel underneath the platforms at the railway station and we were in there for hours. Another time shortly after that, they bombed the High Street and hit the London Whoesale Cash Clothing Stores, and RHO the jeweller's. It frightened them all but I don't think there were any casualties as it was night - time when it happened. My father went there to fight the fires and try to save stuff, and they had to use the municipal drain-clearing machines because the drains were blocked with all the jewels that had got into them. I don't know whether the shop ever got anything back, but years afterwards, people were still finding bits and pieces!

I remember the rationing. Because I was the eldest one at home, I would be sent off to one shop to get the sausages, to Woolworth's to queue to get the biscuits, and so on. I don't suppose it hurt us very much. And then, of course, D-Day came and the Americans arrived. They took over a school that was next to me, Westburgh Road School. Then we had the Poles, the French, the Czechs, all different nationalities. They took over the empty houses. Nothing else but troops. They all seemed to get on well together but they weren't in Southend very long. We used to get sweets and gum from the Americans - "Got any gum, chum?" waa the phrase that we all used, and they would throw gum to us. They had all these magazines sent to them with pictures of Del Monte tinned fruits and fruit salad, and we used to sit there wondering what they tasted like as we hadn't a clue. It was a very interesting period of my life. It was very difficult for mothers to get food on the table for their families but my mum managed to do it and lots of other mums did too. It was good when we lived at Rochford as we had a schoolteacher who kept bees, we had a coalman who lived next door to us and kept rabbits, up the road the Nashes kept chickens, we grew potatoes and we had fruit, and next door to us was an empty house that had cherry trees in the garden. We all sort of lived together and swapped our produce so we didn't really go without. We were very fortunate because we had such a variety of things — honey for tea! We didn't have any gf the more exotic things that are grown today like sweetcorn and peppers, though.

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