When the second world war started, my parents were in their mid-thirties and had four children, aged three, six, nine and twelve. They had struggled through the hard times of the thirties and when I think of what they must have felt like when the war came, I positively shudder.
I was the six-year-old and the following story I think shows how the inability to do anything about it brought about a temporary acceptance of the situation, a defiant sense of humour and a comradeship. All things that helped to stop many a nervous breakdown. ( had they been invented then?)

The Blitz was at its worst, sometime around 1941 my family lived in Dagmar Terrace in the shadow of St Mary's Church in Islington. We had moved into the upstairs of the house - it was either number two or four, having been bombed out just a bit further up Essex road nearer the Angel.

The lower floors of the house were occupied by a lady called Vi and her children. Her husband was in the army but my dad was a policeman so we saw him whenever he was off duty, not very often. My mum shared the kitchen with Vi because there was no gas upstairs, I don't think that electricity had reached that house yet.

We hardly had any furniture, except for bedding of one sort or another which we carried to the shelter every night. The shelter was under the local cinema called The Annexe which was just across the Essex Road on or near the corner of Packington Street. It had been fitted out with bunks made of timber and sacking. The whole place had a strong smell of creosote and disinfectant which we all carried with us everywhere but it was safe, so we soon got used to the smell.

Every night, we would go into the shelter after our evening meal ( I can't call it 'dinner' ) and emerge bleary-eyed the next morning dragging our blankets and old overcoats back to the house. I was eight years old and did manage most mornings, to get to school where we would spend as much time in the shelter as in the classroom.

One day, Vi asked us kids to go up and down the street and try to scrounge a few spoons of sugar here and there for her to make us some toffee apples. I think that the apples had been scrumped from a garden somewhere and she seized the opportunity to give us all a treat.
She must have done this more than once because I have a strong memory of seeing the toffee apples cooling off on a tray outside the house whereas on this particular occasion we didn't get a look at them.
We had all gone down to the shelter as usual, but 'Auntie Vi' had stayed behind to finish making the toffee apples. She eventually came rushing in all breathless because if the recent nights were anything to go by the siren would go any minute. She told my mum that she had left the kitchen in a right mess but would clear up in the morning.

The next morning we hurried home looking forward to a toffee apple for breakfast but as we got nearer we saw that the 'lodging house' a small commercial hotel on the corner of Dagmar Terrace and Essex Road, had all its windows and half its roof blasted out. Then we turned the corner and saw that the first two or three houses, including ours was just a pile of bricks.
My mum, in a flat emotionless voice,said , "Blimey Vi, looks like you left the gas on last night."

We just kept walking until we found another place to live. That wasn't the first time we had been bombed out but I think it was the last. My family all survived the war and my tough old mum lived until she was eighty-four.
Unfortunately my dad died of cancer a week after his seventieth birthday. Just before he died he said " Well at least I got my three score and ten which is more than some of them unlucky buggers in the war"

Submitted to this site by David Fright.