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I remember my mum telling me that my dad was posted down in Plymouth in 1940. She thought she would come down and see my dad, so with her stepsister, the two of them came down here (Plymouth) together. My dad was a Sergeant and had been in service up until the war began. My mother at the time, found out he was on guard duty and her and my aunt, started chatting to my dad, when they would see the Sergeant Major coming along. So dad pushed them into Guardroom and told them to keep quiet.

So there they were. ‘I had to giggle,’ mum said, ‘we were giggling our heads off behind the door and the Sergeant Major shouted to dad ‘Who are you talking to?’ And my dad replied, ‘Nobody’. ‘You got someone in that Guardroom ?’

Well. In goes the Sergeant Major and sees my mum and my Aunt in there. He didn’t believe my mum was my dad’s wife at the time - until they managed to convince him later. But because of it, my poor mum was sent home again with my Aunt, and my dad lost his stripes. That was the first time my dad lost all his stripes. And that was in the beginning of the war in 1940.

“I don’t know exactly when Coventry was bombed - in about ‘42 ‘43? I was born in 1941; I was very young at the time. I’ve family living in Coventry. So it was my three cousins and I. We were all four girls, evacuated to Coventry and we weren’t in Coventry that long before Coventry was bombed so my grandmother insisted we were all brought back. So it seemed, that no sooner we had arrived in Coventry - we were all brought back.

The other thing I remember about the war, because I lived in South East London, not far from the docks - because there was lots of bombing there all the time. I remember going into the air raid shelter - and it stunk. ‘Oh! It was horrible!’ It was dark inside and it used to be like just one bed built into the wall - the only way to get a single bed in was to fit it into the wall. It was the smell I remember the most. It was dirty, musky, damp, stale smell of dirt. It was horrible! And I used to hate it, but my mum always insisted, when we got in there, to put on our gas masks. Why put on our gas masks when we got into an Air raid shelter - I don’t know. But she always insisted. I put on my gas mask and the only ones who used to use an air raid shelter (We each had one in our own garden in Newcross) were my mum and the two ladies who lived in the house. I remember that as well - very vividly.

We lived in a big Victorian house in Newcross and we lived upstairs and my mum took me into this room. And I remember as she opened the door, and I see this big round thing, in the middle of the room. I didn’t realise what it was and I just looked up in the hole. There was a hole in the roof and mum just closed the door quickly and ran down the stairs and took me over to my nans.

I had to stay at my nans with my mum for quite a few weeks, because it was a Sentry bomb. They just used to drop and then blow up and catch alight - and this one had landed right in the middle of the house, but for some reason it hadn’t gone off. Otherwise the house would have gone up and we would have been in the air raid shelter —but who knows?

I remember when mum went shopping and she used to shop around the corner and everything was on rations. They used to have a big barrel of biscuits and mum used to say ‘Can I ‘ave some broken one’s and that don’t come off me ration book’. And my Nan would give me sweets and say “ Eat ‘em up and eat ‘em on your own, don’t let Sheila, which was my cousin next door, (we were all cousins and we all lived together in the area, like families did back then) don’t let Sheila see you eat ‘em, you eat them up like a good gal for your nanny”.

And I can remember that awful egg powder. Ugh! It was horrible I don’t know if they made it up with water or milk, because obviously I was too young. But all I know, it was a tasteless, horrible, whitish yellow Yuck! It just tasted like nothing, it tasted like powdered nothing - it’s the only way I can describe it - the egg powder.

I know fruit was very hard to get hold of. I mean, a banana, I never tasted one until after the war cos they just didn’t exist. But I remember once my mum brought home this orange and she had been to a nightclub with my aunt again and she said “ Eat that orange all up, it will do you good”. And I didn’t really know what an orange was and she’s peeling it and says, “ You eat that all up, that costs me the price of twenty Weights”. I always remember that. So the price of twenty Weights, was probably about two shillings or something. That’s how much that orange cost my mum.

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