Apparently after six months my mother got fed up with living, eating and sleeping in one room like that and as my father had said that the bombing had died down by then, we returned to London. When we got home the windows in the front room had been cracked and broken by bomb blast and were all stuck up with sticky brown paper as well as gauze.

Having returned home from evacuation and restarted at the junior school up the road, my memories are of having to carry our gas masks with us at all times. On at least one occasion, we had an air raid practice and had to go into the school shelters, which were large brick structures with concrete roofs built in the playground where we all had to sit on the long wooden benches and I can still smell the cold damp smell of concrete and cement which greeted us in there .

Every night when there were air raids you could hear the crash of the anti aircraft guns going off all around and you would hear the fragments of the shrapnel hitting the ground outside the shelter. We children used to go round in the morning after and collect this shrapnel and we used to trade pieces amongst ourselves to build up our collections. The best bits were thosewhich came from the detonator part which were threaded, and one piece from there would be worth several of the ordinary pieces. We sometimes also found pieces of the Perspex windows from the planes and we use to cut and file these to make rings and pendants for necklaces.

One of the worst dangers were the incendiary bombs, for in the noise of the guns they would fall through the slates of the roof without much noise and could hang in lofts for several days without exploding. Then they would suddenly decide to go up in flames.

In order to get metal for munitions etc., the authorities collected all iron that they could, and one day some men came and cut off the iron railings that ran along the top of the wall in our front garden. Also up the road from where I lived was a bombed site where a house had been hit and demolished. This had left an open space where the authorities set up a collection point for old aluminium such as saucepans, which was taken away and melted down to make aeroplanes.

Leftovers from meals such as potato peelings were also collected and these were placed in special Pig bins which had been placed at intervals along the roadside and these were collected and taken away every week to make pig swill.

In certain of the public parks round where we lived, there were anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons and we used to go and see them, although you could not get really close to them. We used to like to watch the Barrage balloons being winched down and the large sidepieces always reminded me of the pictures of Elephants I had seen with large floppy ears.

The only person I can remember ever being injured by a bomb was a girl in our class at school and when one day she did not come to school we found out that her house had been bombed and she had been killed. Even then, the horror of death still did not strike home to us as children.

Sometime, possibly around 1942, I think that the amount of bombing must have decreased considerably for we ceased sleeping in the shelter and returned to sleeping indoors, although of course there were occasions when we had to get up in the night to go to the shelter. Amongst vague memories of that time is seeing the Home Guard practising blocking the road under the Railway Bridge adjacent to our house. They always seemed to arrive in Bren gun carriers, the small tracked armoured vehicles, to carry out these practices on Sundays. You could hear the vehicles coming along the road so we used to go out and watch them. To block the road, they used to put pieces of bent railway lines into sockets in the road as a deterrent to prevent tanks passing through the opening.

Throughout the war period, the scheme known as double summertime was in operation although at the time I was unaware of it or what it entailed. However I do recall that during the summer, it stayed light very late at night, long after my bedtime, and I can recall being up and about very late at night and it still being light.

Early in 1944, my father took me with him when he went to visit my Aunt and Uncle in Devon and on that journey, for some reason we went to Dartmouth and not Ivybridge. The train actually terminated at a Station called Kingswear which was on the opposite side of the river to Dartmouth and the GWR station at Dartmouth was just a landing stage with a building which the GWR owned together with a small ferry boat connecting Kingswear Station to Dartmouth, (the fare for this ferry cost 1 penny in those days). On that visit we saw lots of what I now know to have been landing craft and I can only suppose that they were being assembled for the D-Day assault.
From the start of 1944 it seems that bombing resumed on a heavier scale and we returned to sleeping in the shelter. I have since read an account of a bad raid during that period on a night in March 1944, in which many houses in the adjacent road to us were set alight by incendiary bombs, as was the church at a crossroads about a mile away which was virtually destroyed by the incendiary bombs. On the opposite corner to the church was a tall block of flats and sometime during the war a rumour went round our school that someone had been caught on the roof of that block of flats using a flashlight to signal the German planes.

When the V1 bombs started, my mother decided that we should not go to school due to the large amount of bombing that was going on and I am of the opinion that she thought if anything was going to happen to us then we should all be together if it did. As a result it was some six months before I went to school again.

I distinctly remember when the first V1 (nicknamed the Flying Bomb, Buzz Bomb or DoodleBug) came over. I was asleep in the bedroom and it was dark. Suddenly we heard this strange unearthly noise and looking out of the bedroom window we saw what appeared to be a plane on fire going through the air. This first occurrence is recorded as being on 12/13th June 1944. The use of these Vengeance Weapons or V-Bombs accelerated and within the next few weeks we were to see many of them and as they descended with little or no warning, my parents chose to be safe, and we returned to sleeping in the shelter in the garden. Although I wasn’t going to school, I was still playing with my friends up the road. All sorts of stories about these Flying Bombs were soon going around, the main one being that the plane had a long spike on the front of it which when it hit the ground pressed a trigger which exploded the bomb.