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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 Ann Powell (formerly Senior) 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 held in Abergavenny to mark the 60th anniversary of VE day.

I can remember the day war broke out, I was three and I was walking across the lawn with my parents, we were going to dig the vegetable garden. And this terrible noise started up and it frightened me to death, it was the air raid siren and my parents turned and grabbed me up and rushed me back into the air raid shelter which my father had dug out and we sat in there all day and nothing happened. That was the phoney war. A year later when my father had gone to war in the fleet air line, I remember one night my mother carrying me out in her arms, crying, tears running down her face and she said “look at the sky”, and it was lit up with red, glowing red flames. And she said, “that’s London burning, remember that” and she’d been born in London, although her parents came from Gloucestershire, she loved London and she was so upset… I’ll never forget that….Nearly every night at one time the air raid sirens would go. We slept under the stairs my baby brother, my mother and I because it was the safest place. If a house was bombed usually the stairs were left standing… so I slept under the stairs the whole war. My baby brother slept in a tin trunk, I don’t think it would have been much protection if he’d been hit by a bomb.

I can remember the rationing and the shortages…the only clothes I could have was school uniform. I can’t really remember school very much, except when the air raid siren went, we were hurried into somewhere safe or I remember my mother taking me away from one school because I was kept in to do my sums and there was an air raid on and she was so angry with them that she took me away and sent me to another school. I used to have to walk about three or four miles to school, that first school, there and back.

I hated dried egg and I hated spam and I still hate pork luncheon meat… can’t stand it! Didn’t mind corned beef, but we were lucky cause we had a large garden with a vegetable patch, growing fruit trees, fruit bushes, we had chickens and ducks, so we were extremely lucky really. We had fresh meat and eggs and a goat… for milk…it used to butt my father, it didn’t like him…. And rabbits, rabbits in a hutch.

I can just remember (VE day) a party on a neighbour’s tennis court which was covered in weeds because it hadn’t been used during the war and we had a fancy dress party, someone found me a clown outfit, and I remember it had big penny spots in different colours all over it. I thought I was the cat’s whiskers! And mum made me a sort of dunce's clown hat out of paper and we all had tables and a big feast, everybody found something to eat somehow. I think they used to save up their rations for a special treat sometimes. we had lots of parties…kept us going….we were always having parties, children’s parties and lots of grow-up parties. I remember my grandparents and my uncle lived next door, my uncle was just too young to go into the RAF and then he got an apprentice with a tool maker so he wasn’t allowed to go in the RAF, which broke his heart…All his friends were in the RAF. and they were pilots and things and I remember having measles and one of my uncle's friends sitting on the end of the bed reading Winnie the Pooh to me, he went off on a bombing raid the next day and he never came back. That still makes me feel like crying.

I also remember some cousins that lived in London and cousin Ninky and Billy, they were my father's cousins, and they had two little girls, I remember Aunty Ninky turning up next door distraught… I don’t know when it was, I think it was near the outbreak of the war, but my cousin Barbara had been sent to school and the class had labels put round their necks and evacuated. Ninky didn’t know, she had this baby in her arms, she turned up at my grandparent’s house next door, absolutely distraught just crying her heart out because Barbara had disappeared and she didn’t know where. Barbara was eventually found in Norfolk on a farm and she never wanted to go home again, she was only about five, but she never came home again really. I think Ninky and the baby stayed next door for quite a while with my Gran. I wasn’t evacuated because I wasn’t in the middle of London.

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