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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Rebecca Hood of the People's War Team in Wales on behalf of Jean Bradley and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The story was gathered at an event to mark the 60th anniversary of VE day, held in Abergavenny.

I remember the first bombs - we were living in a shelter my father built. It was an Anderson shelter but he put an extension on to make it more comfortable for us. there were two double bunks and two single bunks and I always used to insist on sleeping on the top bunk because I would get a bit claustrophobic and the first air raid that I remember was ten bombs in a row…and I remember the first one whizzing down and I kept saying “that one didn’t get us….that one didn’t get us….” my mother was getting frightened and said for goodness sake come down, get on the bottom bunk …you know. I had terrific confidence in the shelter. I felt perfectly safe down there because it was so well built I felt as safe as anything…that didn’t worry me at all. But we had a few scary ones when we were outside…I remember one particular occasion…my father happened to be home that weekend…It happened to be on a Sunday and it was a bit rainy so it wasn’t such a nice day and because you were only allowed to have five inches of bath water you know…to save water and to save fuel….my sister and I reckoned that if we got in the bath together we could have ten..ten inches you see…So we were busy having a bath. Because we weren’t allowed to use a lot of electricity…everything was rationed … my mother would get a towel and put it by the fire and get it when we were ready to get out of the bath. Well this particular morning there was an Air Raid Warden at the door delivering ear plugs or something like that, something or other, and he was talking to my father at the door and then suddenly there was a German plane had got through — there was no air raid warning siren and he came machine gunning the road…came all the way down the street and my sister and I looked at one another, we knew there was something wrong because we could hear the noise you know…so we just, without a word we both got out of the bath, we didn’t have a towel we were completely naked and covered in soap and the Air Raid Warden at the front door he was lying flat on his face in the doorway my father was pushing my mother out of the way to try and get us… I was the biggest one and my mother grabbed me and I was about as tall as her because she was only about four foot eight and my father grabbed the smallest one and we rushed to the back door to run out to the shelter…and dad got out first and then…mum slipped with me and fell on a grating and I grazed all my spine and she grazed all her elbow so we were tearing into the shelter.

Anyway we were OK but a friend of ours who lived up the road — she was in the garden with her father and he got seven bullets in his leg and I think a girl of 20 she was out with brother and she was killed…she got a bullet in her stomach and I think there was a football match going on and I think they had a go at the children. But they didn’t tell us that, naturally…we didn’t hear all the detail. But that was quite scary - and another thing that was a bit upsetting was the V2 bombers and things, because you never got any warning really with those . You were OK if you could hear it — if you could hear the rumbling of it…we saw one coming up the street one day and I thought it was going to hit a tree because it wasn’t that high….but as soon as the engine stopped it either glided or it went straight down…and this particular day it glided and went a few streets away…you know. But then another day we were going to school, a girlfriend and I…we had come home for lunch….and again there was no warning — sometimes they got through without any warning like, you know. We heard one of these V2 things with this drumming of this engine and I was really quite frightened that day, and a woman saw us and hammered on her window for us to come in, and just as we got to her door so the bomb went off like, you know — that fell a few streets away — but during part of the war we went down to the south coast where my father was stationed …we got fed up not being with him so we joined him down at Lee on Solent where he worked at the airport and there again there were only a handful of kids downs there because most of them had been evacuated and the local school had been taken over as a hospital and we used the library for lessons. So there were literally only a handful of us down there, but we used to come up home from school, get a couple of sandwiches to go on the beach in the summer but all the top of the cliffs were covered with barbed wire so we used to crawl under the barbed wire, which we shouldn’t have done…. to get onto the beach. But if there was a red flag flying it meant there was practice going on with live ammunition so if the flag was flying we had to be very careful.….and we were there one day when they were expecting an invasion and they blew a hole in the pier ….because it used to go way out. So we thought that was exciting we saw that blown up one day! And another thing…there were trenches on the cliff face and what surprised us was that every other gun was a dummy one….just to look good from the air I suppose and so we would play on there but if a siren sounded we would get into one of the trenches. The siren went one day and we were in one of the trenches and we saw a German aircraft — I think its terrible now when I think about it — but it was shot down in flames and we all cheered you know as kids not thinking about the poor devil that was inside like you know they were just the enemy and you didn’t think of them in that way like.

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