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These memories are contributed by Paul Nicholls and added to the site with his permission.

One thing I remember quite well is that to provide enough iron for the war effort railings from parks and from houses were taken away. Opposite the house where I lived there was a large recreation ground which must have had a mile and a half or two miles of railings and they all went. For us as kids it was great because we didn’t have to go through a gate to get into the playing fields we could go anywhere along the road to get in. You can still see examples in front gardens in Ninian Road in the Roath Park area of Cardiff where the railings used to be …the little stumps of metal which stick out through the lead foundations in the tops of the walls where the railings used to be. And that’s a lasting reminder, I guess people have forgotten about that, but it still tells you something.

I can remember also going to the cinema and seeing the Pathe newsreels and whenever there were war items on there and famous figures like Winston Churchill came on the whole audience would cheer and clap — we wouldn’t do that today — there was a superb spirit. The other thing I remember was the windows of houses were all marked with tape the idea was to have sticking tape on the windows would stop the fragmentation of glass into small fragments which could injure people.

As a 6, 7. 8 year old I wasn’t afraid as such…I was more excited by events of the war. Even when Cardiff was raided to hear the chug chug chug of the bombers as they came wave after wave. Yes there was a certain trepidation, but it wasn’t outright fear. It was almost like a game, it wasn’t quite real to me. We had an ACAC — anti-aircraft base near where I lived and occasionally you’d here the puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-pumb guns fire…that was rather exciting for me as a kid. Just as we have here in Monmouthshire low flying aircraft it thrills me and scares me at the same time when they fly over…but it doesn’t fill me with awe and dread and I guess that’s how it was largely in the war.

The dock area of Cardiff was targeted. About half a mile away from where we lived some houses were hit. The nearest we got was when our house had an incendiary fall on it and although it did flare up we had an air raid warden who came very quickly and put it out, so it didn’t really do any damage. And there was a certain esteem value about that amongst the kids that I played with you all wanted to be a bit different from the rest. To say you’d had an incendiary on your house, you could swank about it and could have greater reknown in the gang. There were a lot of features about how children interacted together in groups. We called them gangs and it sounds horrible today but it worked well. We used to exchange things. We’d buy sweets with our coupons and somebody would buy one type of sweet and somebody else another and then we’d swap over so we’d have a good mixture. You couldn’t buy toys so we used to have toys that were handed on by older members of the family and swap them for other things. I remember Dinky toys - all metal toys and the vehicles had little rubber tyres - and they’d treat them like currency, swapping them for another model of a Dinky toy or something completely different. That was another aspect that was quite enjoyable in a way and I think it was important because it was an early way of children working together and giving a sense of community. I think another way was that we all used to go foraging for shrapnel after raids and it was surprising the bits of shrapnel that one would find …..it’s strange now, it’s the sort of thing you didn’t keep. I wish we’d kept some as an example of what you did in those days.

One of the things you had of course were the shelters and we had what I refer to as a table shelter inside the house. And my grandfather….because at that time we lived with my grandparents ……he would insist on the adults of the family having a little nip of crème de menthe before they went into the shelter: “just in case things got a bit rough�

I remember VE day… and in some of the roads behind where I live there were parties and one of the amazing things was that although war had meant that fireworks were not available, people came out with fireworks for that event. I can remember rockets going up and Catherine wheels going off. People at the beginning of the war had had stores of fireworks which they’d intended to use in one way or another and they’d kept them, like they kept many other things for a rainy day, or for when it was all over. And that was a very pleasant surprise to see fireworks. I think as children we used to wonder about certain things, you’d see on greengrocers shops adverts for Fyffes bananas and we’d never had a banana we didn’t know what they were. So it was a joy when we went post war and bananas started coming. It was the same with ice-cream. Ice-cream was an unknown quantity for us…during the war. When it started coming on stream there were queues at the ice-cream shops, you had to be dedicated to get an ice-cream. I usually found you’d wait for half an hour or an hour and you’d get to the counter and they’d say sorry we don’t have any more today. It wasn’t brilliant stuff…it tasted very powdery. Overall I think for a child in my situation it wasn’t too bad. I don’t think I was really aware of any sense of being deprived of things. We enjoyed what we had at the level it was presented to us.

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