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

I was 7 when the war started and was at primary school in Scarborough. I don’t remember war being declared in September, but when we broke up the July before I can remember all the children in the playground in columns according to class. And somebody pointed to a sign up in the sky — it was probably aeroplane trails — it was a cross and this person said “That means there’s a war coming”. And I remember shivering…! I don’t actually remember the day that war broke out, but I do remember seeing the Pathe news in the cinema and Chamberlain coming back and waving his piece of paper that he’d signed with Hitler to say that there was no going to be a war!

I don’t remember time frames, but I can remember some things vividly…How my father made wooden frames and then he tacked on linoleum and every night we had to put these boards up against the sash windows to keep out the light. That was our blackout. I lived in a sort of Coronation Street tall Victorian House with three floors and I could see the moors from the back windows and the sea from the front. There was an awful lot going on in Scarborough because it was a garrison town. We were absolutely packed out with service people from all over the world and as a child I can remember they all had flashes on their shoulders…and I liked to read them. There was New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Rhodesia, South Africa Czekoslovakia, Poland, from everywhere they were coming into the country. The other thing I remember, which annoyed the children very much…because being by the seaside we were only five minutes from the beach. One of the first things they did was to put barbed wire up all the way round the front, and also they built these huge concrete blocks, about fifteen feet high. These were to stop the tanks….if they came on the sand they couldn’t come up the road to where we lived these concrete blocks were stopping them. Also when we used to play on the cliffs playing dens and things amongst the long grass….the path was suddenly obstructed by the barbed wire and all the kids were peeping through and we saw these signs which said “Danger, keep out — Mines” …and that gave us a little frisson. The places where we’d be playing were now, if we went through…we’d get blown up.

The evacuees didn’t come for a while ….I guess for about a year. The children arrived — I remember them coming down the street with their labels on and their gas masks and their packs and the mothers and children were standing out in the front when the children came down….and they were allocated. I don’t know how my mother got out of it, but we didn’t have any…and I think that was good because my mother was a very nervy person and I don’t think she could have coped. She just had me. But I knew lots of people round about and my mother’s friend — because Scarborough was a seaside town with boarding houses and guest houses — and she had a small boarding house and she took four because virtually she used them as cheap labour. The reason why we had so many servicemen was because there were so many hotels and guest houses that there were plenty of places for them to be placed.

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