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

My first memories of the war (I was 2 years old) were my father and my uncles digging a Anderson Shelter in the back garden. I was bored so I stick my head through a galvanised watering can, which cut me very badly and the fire brigade was called. They sawed it off my head.

After this my brother was born in March 1939. We carried on living in London and one day my mother had to go shopping and the all clear hadn’t been given. We all went to the Co-op and as we were about to go in, the police man was there and said to my mother “where do you think you are going?” and she said “I’m going shopping in there” and he said “no you’re not, you’re going in that shelter over there”. Then there was an enormous bang, and when we came out, the policeman said “where were you going?” and Mum said “to the Co-op” and as she said this, she realised the Co-op had disappeared.

Another memory I have, is we were all in the shelter, and some one came in and I heard them say “Poor Mrs Green has bought it” I thought it literally meant she had bought something, but it was 40 years later when I realised that in fact she had died.

I can remember sleeping on the underground with my brother and mother on the platforms as she felt safer there than in the garden shelter.

We used to walk back from the underground to where we lived and we passed a house, with only one wall standing, and there were wall lights on that wall still burning, and they were gas mantles and the rest of the house had been destroyed. Mum said “I must find out where they got their gas mantles from”.
We finally moved to Reading in 1940 and a bomb fell on the middle of Reading. So mum took us to see it and a man standing near by said “It’s those bloody Londoners bought their war with them” to which my mother hit him with her handbag and was arrested by a police man.

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