My first experience of the Second World War

😂😂 perhaps you have still to reach your potential!
We were talking war today. Mum was regaling my grandson with stories of keeping a pig in the garden.
Her father was in the home guard and had a pitchfork to keep any stray German parachutists under control.

My mother's house was bombed in August 1940 in Croydon when they were trying to destroy the airport. My mother hid under the stairs with my baby sister and when they came out, the ceiling had fallen into the apricot jam she had been making with the last of the sugar.
Then they were evacuated to family in north Surrey close to Biggin Hill. She and my sister had another lucky escape when they were in the garden and a plane flew over very low, firing at civilians.

I remember being frightened when all the men were demobbed and.came back to the village.
Suddenly all these big, loud, demanding human beings.

I hid under the table when, horror of horrors, two of them, my father and my uncle invaded our house. I was very young and I think I mixed them up with Germans.

I was born near the beginning of the war. I remember being very scared of the sound of planes, and I remember the blackout, but not much else. My father was a schoolmaster, which was a “reserved occupation”, so he wasn’t in the army. He was in the Home Guard, I’m told.

The biggest effect the war had on me was the restricted food, Rationing continued until I was about 13 - I still vividly remember the day sweets came off ration! We had dried egg and dried bananas (delicious) - and rabbit, which I refused to eat. (My mother blamed Beatrix Potter.) A few weeks into the war my mother, my brother and I went to live with my grandmother in rural Lancashire, because we lived on Merseyside where there were docks, and therefore bombs. My father commuted.

My parents had German friends, so I knew that there were plenty of good Germans, and it was only Hitler and his Nazis that we hated.

I was born at the end of the war, but I remember my mum telling me that when Glasgow was being bombed , she was standing at her front door,,,almost 50 miles away, and the force of the bombs, knocked the door from her hands.

That's an extraordinary story of survival, Sieska.
I have no memory of WW2, born between VE day and VJ day. My late DH was 4 when it began and in fact his 10th birthday was VE day. Of course, he had many vivid memories of that time.
What must it be like for children in Ukraine now?

I don’t remember anything as I was born at the end of 1944. But my aunt did tell me I slept in a drawer for the first few months of my life

Well, I was born after the war but one unusual item in our toybox was a mangled shell which my father had picked up, although he was in Persia (Iran) and Iraq for some of the war. He was supervising building works at Habaniya before returning to England. He never told me the Habaniya base was abandoned after being massively attacked!

I spent a fascinated evening (in Canada) when I was 20, listening to my mother's cousins reminiscing about putting on the tin helmets and diving under the work benches when the sirens went off, while working at the aircraft factory in our town.

A local school was lucky not to get flattened. A British fighter plane in trouble was forced to ditch, narrowly missing the school. I think the pilot lost his life.

Hi Sieska, I am a HULL girl, my Mother and her twin were 11 when war broke out.
They were eventually evacuated but before the evacuation my Uncle told me that he cycled from their home near Boothferry Rd to Albert Avenue swimming pool/baths, when he got there he was surprised to see it quite deserted, he went in to see it was being used as a temporary morgue after severe bombing raid.
He was traumatised.

Maybe the something special is surviving into your 89th year!

That wool shawl may have saved you from serious injury, too. Wool is naturally fire-resistant and that could be the reason you were unscathed. www.woolmark.com/globalassets/_06-new-woolmark/_industry/research/factsheets/gd2405-wool-is-fire-resistant.pdf

It must have been a dreadful day for Hull but it was a lucky day for you.

Amazing story, Sieska.

No stories from me as I wasn't born, DH has some stories but they're not mine to tell!

Such interesting stories . My mum was born in 1935 and lived in London . She had some amazing stories as told by her parents. Both of living in London during the blitz and being evacuated, first to family in Bournemouth and then to South Devon . My grandad couldn’t sign up due to partial deafness but was a fire watcher/ warden .

My father was born in Utrecht in 1911. His family emigrated from there to London when he was three or four. When the Netherlands were invaded his brothers joined the Royal Dutch Army but my dad couldn't because of a congenital hip injury. Instead he worked in the Dutch War Office in London but he never revealed anything about his job. The day he left he was given a solid silver cigarette box inscribed "O.G.S. 1943". I have never discovered what those letters stand for, but I now own the box.

My mum was in the Fire Service in London during the Blitz. Later she joined the army where she met my dad.

No personal experience but my mum pointed out where the fish &chip shop was before it was bombed.
My mum worked in the Danger buildings in the Woolwich Arsenal. We lived opposite the massive buildings.
She said the pay was very good because of the danger they were in.
Before they got the job they had to supply a water sample. My mum didn’t think she’d get it because she had TB.
She asked her friend to do a sample for her. Job done 😂
My father was 19 when he went to sea as a signalman on the Russian Convoys. That seriously messed with his brain.

I was born in 1937, 2 years and 2 months old when war was declared.
I remember being fitted for a gas mask, the ones for children had a cartoon character on it.
I never had to wear it but when I started at Infant school we had to take it with us every day with a packed lunch in case we couldn’t get home.
Our village never saw anything although Nottingham and Derby, our nearest towns did see some bombing, particularly Derby with large engineering works.

My involvement though was the fact that our village was chosen to receive Evacuees from the London area.
What those poor children went through was awful.
Taken from their families and just placed randomly with families they had never met.
We had a girl the same age as me, her name was Maureen and she stayed with us for ages.
Her older brother Bert was not happy and was allowed to return home, her mother did visit us several times as did her father who was in the army and stationed within travelling distance but he couldn’t get leave very often.
One boy who was billeted with cousins of my father lost both his parents in the bombing and just stayed on with the family.

We stayed in touch for quite sometime but it gradually petered out, I regret it sometimes but my father died when I was 11 and our lives changed, however I did go and stay with the family in my early teens.
It all seems so long ago.

My father was career Royal Navy and had served in WW1 too. He was away in the Mediterranean when WW2 began.
My mother told me there would be periods of months when there was no communication from him and she had no idea what was happening.

I was one year old when the war ended so have no memories of it, but heard a lot from my relatives. My father, his father and his brothers , and my mother's brother were all away in the Merchant Navy.My grandfather was a ship's captain and got the OBE for bravery after his ship was fired by the Germans, and he managed to bring her home to the nearest safe port without any loss of life to himself and his crew.He became an alcoholic after the war, my grandmother left him and he never contacted any of his family.My dad said it was most likely the effects of what he had been through which caused him to take to drink.
My mother had an uncle who worked for a wholesale butcher, he somehow managed to get blackmarket meat .He would meet my mother outside a local butchers on a Saturday and slip a joint of good beef under my pram cover without anyone noticing. I also wore dresses made from coffin lining material, courtesy of my mother's aunt who worked for an undertaker.She would give my mother the off cuts, the material looked like real silk and my mother got compliments on the lovely baby dresses I wore, of course she did not disclose how she got the material.

My father was a Commando in the war. He never spoke about it.

My mum was in the RAF posted in Hull for a time. She said they used to duck out of the shelters so they could watch the Germans flying over the Humber - she could be a bit daft, my mum!

My mum lived near The Docks in London . She told me her best friend Rose was killed by an unexploded bomb , seems her father opened the front door and the bomb went off also killing him . I left home very young and sadly was unable to return due to distance / circumstances so I didn't ever get the chance to ask mum about her young life . I don't know how people survived such horrors . Mum wasn't really interested in talking about those years .

My Granny was very intrepid. She ran the local WI and persuaded them to equip a van as a canteen for emergencies. She drive it across Scotland overnight to bring tea comfort to survivors of the Clydebank blitz. No good cross country roads and dodgy lights. She wasn't a very confident driver but was determined to do it. We are very proud of her.

My parents, newly married school teachers, were living in a house in central London near the British Museum, during the Blitz.

Everyone slept in the basement where they listened to the bombing and each morning my dad would climb the stairs and peer out to see where the bombs had landed.
Then one morning, after a particularly loud night, he saw the next door house totally destroyed and where 7 university students died in the basement.
Soon after that their schools were evacuated to the countryside.

Your story of survival is extraordinary Sieska thanks for sharing.

Our house in Hull was hit twice by bombs. On both occasions we were sleeping in the shelter in the garden so we survived. After the first time I stood outside and looked at the house. Instead of being the normal peaked roof it looked like a V-shape, i.e. the roof was inverted. Maybe the bomb had not exploded and was still inside? Men came and sorted it. They made the ground level safe so we lived in that for a few months. I remember that there was a tarpaulin covering what was left of the building's roof. Then bomb number 2 totally flattened the house and suddenly we had nowhere to live.