Interview

Child 2 What kind of work did you do in school?

Mrs H Well we did lots of work just like you boys and girls are doing. We had arithmetic and R.E. and we had cookery classes. We went to church every morning because it was a Church of England School so we had a service every morning before we went to school, which was quite nice. We had lots of different activities. We had art class, like you have. We had P.E. every day. We had to run every day around the playground, a mile every single day, which was quite nice too. I liked P.E.

Child 3 Did you ever take your school work into an air raid shelter?

Child 4 What if the teacher was shouting and you couldn’t hear the sirens ?

Mrs H No lots of children were frightened when they heard the sirens so we had stories and jokes and as I said before I quite liked it . It was quite good fun.

Child 5 You ever been evacuated?

Mrs H No but I did know a few people who were evacuated to our village and they came from London. It seems strange. It was only 25 miles away. We lived in the country so they probably thought we we wouldn’t get bombed there. Unfortunately we did see quite a lot of bombing.

Child 6 Did you have any help building Anderson Shelters or anything?

Mrs H No I was too young. I was quite small. So they were built very fast when the war started s we’d have somewhere to go and be safe. And we used to also , if we were at home, ( If you look at films you’ll see that if a bomb is dropped lots of times the only safe place, the place that is left standing is the staircase.) so my mother used to have,underneath the staircase, we used to have a little bed. If we were at home and the siren went my mum took all of us and we used to go into the little cupboard underneath the stairs. And she’d read comic books to us and she’d tell us scary stories, believe it or not. It kept our minds away from the noise of the bombs.