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(This story has been submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from Radio Cambridgeshire Action Desk Bircham House on behalf of Mildred Joy and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Joy fully understands the sites terms and conditions).

I was in London during the war bringing up 2 children. My boy Brian who was around 4 and my daughter Dorothy Ann was around 1. We lived in Walthamstow for the best part of the war and then moved to Greenwich. I looked after my children in Walthamstow. We had an Anderson Shelter in the garden but my son used to cry so much to go into the shelter we had to put a Morrison shelter in the house, and every time the sirens went we went in it. We never had a direct hit but we were blasted out. Our doors used to go and the window used to go, it was terrible.

My husband was in the Metropolitan Police and he was out all days every day, and this time he was due home around 6pm, but my son wouldn’t go to bed without seeing him, saying he wanted his daddy. When he did come home at 8pm my son ran up to him. My husband had tears running down his face. You see a bomb had dropped on the school while they were having their lunch and my husband said this is the first whole child I have picked up all day, and that’s why he was crying. That was the most horrible part of it all.

We had blackouts and being married to a policeman we had to do everything we should. We weren’t allowed to show a light of any description.

We didn’t have a direct hit but our neighbours did, so you would help them if you could, by giving them tea. There was a garden next to us, a garden of a pub. The garden got blasted out as they had a direct hit.

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