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I was three and on holiday at Blackpool when war was declared. My father was a clerk on the Railways and so we had free travel. He had left Nantwich in 1915 at the age of eighteen and survived three years in the trenches in the First World War. Therefore he was not required to serve in the Second World War and did his bit as an Air Raid Warden. I remember the air raid shelter we had in the garden covered with clods of earth from the field beyond. The first year mushrooms as big as saucers grew on it! I can remember all the talk of the night Coventry was heavily bombed (we lived in the West Midlands) and when the ‘all clear’ was sounded, chatting over the fence to the neighbours.

The blue ration book I had sticks in my mind and the treats of sweets; the taste of a banana at the age of nine; rushing to the greengrocers when oranges appeared and queuing for an ice cream in Lewis’s in Birmingham; the ‘Black Out’ and black curtains at the windows and stumbling home with my mother in the dark.

My sister got married in 1943 and with great difficulty enough’ clothing coupons were amassed for her dress and mine as a bridesmaid. She did have a wedding cake and I can imagine that would have had its difficulties too. Being so young I do not think I realized the seriousness of the war. I just knew Hitler, the Germans and the Japanese were very bad.

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