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This contribution was submitted by Sylvia May to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with her permission.

We were bombed out in Deptford, London. Because my mother was pregnant and had two young children under three and a half, which I was at the time.…we were put on a train — we didn’t know where we were going — and came to Cardiff. Some of the women who were pregnant stayed in Cardiff…the rest went up the Valleys. We stayed in Old Church Road, Whitchurch with a Mrs. Shellabeare. We were very frightened as children — we couldn’t understand what was happening. A bomb did fall near the house in the night time and I recollect I ran into the path of a Green goddess and my first recollection was of my mother screaming after me and people calling after me.
The baby — Peter - was born the end of April when we were still living in Whitchurch. He was born in the City Lodge. They put us two girls, with my mother, in an ambulance. We all had to go when she had the baby…that’s the way things were.

Then my mother with two other ladies went looking for other accommodation. Mrs. Rackie — she had two or three children also — she found a house in Whitchurch road opposite Cardiff barracks ( Maindy barracks its now called) and we lived in Cathays Terrace. The house we had had been bombed at some time. It was alright at the front, but all the back was bombed so we could only use the kitchen and we had to go out the one door, around the room into another door which was the scullery. There was no electricity. We only had one water tap which was coming out of the side of the wall in the kitchen. There was a great big stone boiler which you lit a fire under…and that was the only way you could get hot water for washing clothes or for baths. We had a little tin bath in front of the fire on a Sunday night…mother would fetch hot water from the boiler in buckets going out from the scullery. I was lucky, because I was the oldest I had the water first! She would keep a kettle of hot water on the fire to top up the water if it got cold. That was our Sunday night ritual after we’d been to Church…the Salvation Army. We’d go to Sunday School and then come home for tea, which consisted usually of rice, and prunes…to keep us regular. And if we weren’t regular, mother would give us chocolate ex-lax! We lived there right through from 1941….and my father died in 1969.

First day I went to school — of course its strange for everybody — but I spoke differently to the other children and they couldn’t understand me. I had a Cockney accent. And when the children found out we came from London…well, they weren’t very nice. They told us to “Get back to London and take the Germans with you!”. According to them, the planes, the German planes didn’t come here until we got here. It wasn’t very happy at first, and we knew nobody of course, there were no relatives, no aunties or uncles or anybody else. In those days you see, the men were all in the forces, so the women had to work to get money to feed their families. Food was very scarce we all had ration books, and that was an average of 2 — 3 ounces of cheese, butter, sugar, tea. But of course the bane of it was you had to queue up for it…and if you couldn’t afford it, it didn’t matter how many coupons you had...you went without. But we did have happy times, everybody shared, everybody was friendly — once they got to know you, they were friendly. And all our neighbours were our aunties and uncles…because as it happened we lived in a terrace with five shops and just the four houses, and the business people never had children of their own so they all made a fuss of us. When my mother went to have my second sister at the end of the war we stayed with Mrs. Rich in the sweet shop. We liked that. She had and old tin container came in one day and she unpacked it and left it in the shop and my brother said : “dare you to see what’s inside there”. Well because we were so tiny I had to stand on a chair to get up to the height of the container which might have been about three feet high and my sister one side and me the other we opened the lid and I fell in. And it was the ice cream fridge….we got no ice-cream and we never got sweets that week…because we’d been naughty!

We had a pretty good upbringing because of all these neighbours watching out for us. The British Red Cross clothed us — my sister and me — because we were the evacuees. So we had grey flannel knickers that came down to our knees and grey skirts and of course people knew we were evacuees because of the way we were dressed. The Salvation Army was very good to us. My grandmother was a Salvation Army officer so that’s where the Salvation Army first came in. I did go back to London in 1948 and an old aunt took me to show me where the old houses were all bombed out. I really didn’t understand how the houses on one side of the road could be all bombed out but those on the other side were still standing.

We were frightened, but everybody was frightened….we just didn’t know when the planes were coming when the bombs were coming. But it was a little bit different for us. Apparently Cardiff had a German factory down the docks. When my father came to Cardiff — he was a policeman in London so he stayed in London and he didn’t know where we were, the Salvation Army found us for him. When he came down he had gingerish hair, a gingerish handlebar moustache and the surname Mischer…and for some reason quite a few people had the suspicion that we were related to Germans. After the war my father said “We’ll change the spelling from Mischer to Mescher” - which sounded more English.

When the Americans came a lot of them stayed up at Maindy barracks. Until then we’d used a bowling green near our house as a park….Our park we called it. Well when the Americans were there they overtook it all…so we weren’t allowed to play in our park any more, which meant we had quite a long walk from Cathays Terrace down to Roath park. On a nice day we’d take a bag of jam sandwiches and a bottle of water and we’d stay out all day. And my father used to say, don’t you come back before five o’clock. In those days we were able to go paddling and swimming in Roath Park lake. So Roath Park was a marvellous park, just like Victoria Park, but that was for special occasions.
At the end of the war they started having flower gardens in Roath Park. So the first mother’s day my mother had the most beautiful bouquet you can think of. We had the children in the old pram…a big black pram…and you could take the bottom of the pram out so it could be used like a pushchair with one child facing each way. When we got to Roath Park, we emptied the babies out of the pram, filled the pram up with flowers and made the babies walk home with us! Mother wasn’t pleased…oh no! We got a smack and sent to bed for that. We couldn’t understand it because we were so proud with all these beautiful flowers.

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