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'This story was submitted to the People's War site by Rick Allden of the CSV Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Coventry and Warwickshire Action Desk on behalf of Anne Bailey and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions'.

The tale goes that when one cheeky youngster was reprimanded for some demeanour and told to come out for punishment, he grinned when he saw the slipper in her hand. He wasn’t grinning when he went back to his seat. My father used to carry a length of rubber tubing from a Bunsen burner in his pocket but said he never had to use it. Couldn’t do it now, could you?
We never went away for holidays during the war, of course, but I don’t remember feeling I was missing anything. Give me a book and I was happy - still am!
So my war years passed, even in a targeted town, tranquil enough, with just the usual childhood problems apart from nights spent in the shelter. Oh, and we had shelters on the boys’ playing field. We would always hope that if there were a daylight raid it would come just before the lesson for which we hadn’t done our homework! Some of the teachers let us play paper games like ‘battleships,’ but some had us chanting French and Latin verbs and so on. Most unfair we thought!
Outside activities were curtailed, of course. Drama groups, uniformed organisations, were depleted through evacuation or parents fearing air raids. We did go swimming with the school, however. But even then I never saw a bombed building.
We were all given identity cards and I can remember my number to this day as I can my medical card number from when the National Health Service started. I suppose we were meant to carry the former about but I don’t recall carrying mine.
So, my war, in a way, was a ‘phoney’ one. No bombing, no killed relatives, no memory of hardship.
Apart from one incident. While in Aberystwyth we were on the prom when the lifeboat was launched. We had heard the guns booming from an Army post up the coast at Tonfanau but thought they were just practising. However the word went round that an enemy plane had been shot down. We were hurried away but I learned later it was probably a stray on its way back from bombing Liverpool and that all the crew had died.
That was the closest I got to seeing war, at first hand.

This story was donated to the People’s War website by Anne Bailey, of the Leam Writers. If you would like to find out more about Leam Writers call 0845 900 5 300.

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