My first experience of the Second World War

I was born near the beginning of the war. I remember being very scared of the sound of planes, and I remember the blackout, but not much else. My father was a schoolmaster, which was a “reserved occupation”, so he wasn’t in the army. He was in the Home Guard, I’m told.

The biggest effect the war had on me was the restricted food, Rationing continued until I was about 13 - I still vividly remember the day sweets came off ration! We had dried egg and dried bananas (delicious) - and rabbit, which I refused to eat. (My mother blamed Beatrix Potter.) A few weeks into the war my mother, my brother and I went to live with my grandmother in rural Lancashire, because we lived on Merseyside where there were docks, and therefore bombs. My father commuted.

My parents had German friends, so I knew that there were plenty of good Germans, and it was only Hitler and his Nazis that we hated.

I remember being frightened when all the men were demobbed and.came back to the village.
Suddenly all these big, loud, demanding human beings.

I hid under the table when, horror of horrors, two of them, my father and my uncle invaded our house. I was very young and I think I mixed them up with Germans.

My mother's house was bombed in August 1940 in Croydon when they were trying to destroy the airport. My mother hid under the stairs with my baby sister and when they came out, the ceiling had fallen into the apricot jam she had been making with the last of the sugar.
Then they were evacuated to family in north Surrey close to Biggin Hill. She and my sister had another lucky escape when they were in the garden and a plane flew over very low, firing at civilians.

😂😂 perhaps you have still to reach your potential!
We were talking war today. Mum was regaling my grandson with stories of keeping a pig in the garden.
Her father was in the home guard and had a pitchfork to keep any stray German parachutists under control.