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Vera Fairnington, Wooler, Northumberland

I remember being told that war had broken out it was a Sunday and I had taken my two younger brothers to the park to play while my mother was making the dinner. The siren sounded and a passerby told us to go straight home as war had just been declared. I was nine years old and it had been a beautiful summer. We lived in Primrose, which is near Jarrow (now in Tyne and Wear) and the docks at Jarrow came under heavy bombing. I remember seeing dog fights during the day between spitfires and messersmiths.

My dad dug a trench in the garden for the family to use as an air raid shelter; he had served in World War One so knew all about digging trenches. He had managed to get some railway sleepers and these were to be used for the roof. My mam put hot ashes in the bottom of the trench to dry it out. We only used the trench once as it got so badly flooded it didn鈥檛 work. I remember during the first raid, trying to find our way to the trench in the blackout. Our next shelter was under the larder in the kitchen. My dad made a trap door in the larder that opened into the foundations under the house. As soon as the siren sounded dad lowered us children under the house. There were blankets to sit on and keep us warm and my parents passed down candles so that we weren鈥檛 left in the dark and we had books to read. We would listen to the planes passing overhead. We were soon able to recognise the different planes by the sound of their engines. We knew whether they were German or British and if they were fighter planes or bombers. My parents stayed in the house during the raids.

We were not issued with an Anderson Shelter until 1942. Dad used the railway sleepers to make bunks for us and we children slept in the Anderson shelter every night until the end of the war. My mother had other two children during the war, two more boys. The babies slept in the house with mam and dad.

We missed a lot of schooling, as the schools were only open half a day. A girl in my class called Edith was killed when a bomb demolished her street. On another occasion, after Princess Street had been bombed, my dad, who was a special constable, found what he thought was a doll in the rubble, it turned out to be a baby and thankfully still alive.

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