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I am Mary Bailey, born Elliott and I was aged 10 at the outbreak of the war. Father wasn’t called up - he was much older. He ran a grocery business... But he did lots of other jobs during the war. One of the things that he did, which we didn't know anything about until after the war was that he was one of these secret people. ... He wasn't in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard ... but the Resistance I suppose. Mother was in the W I and she used to make nets - camouflage nets - she took over one room in the house - and she knitted for soldiers.

Father was very busy with the shop - he was very short-staffed - it was a grocery shop and he had a big round - he delivered to smaller shops in quite a big radius, so he had an awful lot of work to do, and the shop was bombed. I was going to a party in my school which was in Victoria Grove and I'd gone upstairs to get my shoes and my father was waiting for me at the back door, looking over the town, and suddenly a plane flew through, quite low - we used to get that quite a bit - and "My God" he said, "that was a Jerry". And then of course we heard the explosion, and (he ) yelled at me "Hurry up, hurry up! I've got to go" I grabbed my shoes and went with him - we were stopped at the bottom of South Street -"You can't go through - there's an unexploded bomb and I think your shop's got it". My father insisted and found this was so, but I went the other way and attended my party!

We lived in West Bay and my mother had a pass to go to West Bay - older people had passes to go into a part of West Bay - not all of it, a part of it. There were certain areas where you weren't allowed to go anyway. They were very much controlled - we were occasionally allowed to go in swimming if we had a special pass. It was all very strange really -but we lived through it . I remember they (my parents) had a silver wedding during the war and my aunt wanted to come and visit and my father covered her up with a blanket in the back of the car to get her in! Of course, West Bay was an area where we had our suitcases packed and you had to be prepared to move at any moment, and we never had any evacuees. We had soldiers everywhere. Friends of ours who lived on the cliff overlooking West Bay, they put the gun in their garden and our friends were moved out - a lot of people were moved out.

A munitions dump was situated where the Haven Holiday Camp is now, in Burton Bradstock, with minefields all around.

George VI visited West Bay, as well as many important military officers, including Montgomery.

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