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Interview with his Paternal Grandma, Diana, by Ewan, 27/12/2004

Q Where did you live in 1939?
A I lived in Surrey, just south of London

Q Do you remember how old you were when war broke out?
A I was 11

Q Have you any memories of the announcement of the war?
A Oh yes. I was on holiday and my sister Pam and I were just going to ride some ponies. My father called us over to the house and said, ‘You must hear this, listen to the radio!’ And we listened to the radio and we heard the Prime Minister telling us that we were at war and that was quite frightening really. But nothing seemed to happen, so we went off and had a ride, carrying our gas masks in our boxes, which everybody had to wear.

Q How were you affected by the war?
A Quite a lot really. I did all my growing up during the war and we were sent away to boarding school and came home in the holidays. Ö÷²¥´óÐã was just near London so we heard the bombers coming over, heard the bombs dropping and saw London burning. One night we went upstairs to look out the windows when there had been a lot of air raids over and all we could see was burning

Q Any happy memories of the war?
A When the bombs weren’t coming and when the family were together was when we were happiest. Because when we were at school, my mother was at still near London and my father was in Bristol, so really we spent most of the time worrying about what was happening somewhere else

Q Were you evacuated?
A Only in the sense that we were in boarding school in term time

Q What was that like?
A Very uncomfortable. The food was pretty horrible and we used to be given something we called minced rat for breakfast. And of course everything was rationed. In the holidays at home, I saw so much more of the war, because the people who were injured and had come back used to be let out of hospital when they were well enough. You would see them walking about in their bright blue uniforms and red ties which they had to wear, so you always knew they were wounded soldiers and they were all over the place. Later on we used to see lots of prisoners of war, particularly Italians.

Q Tell us about the air raids
A There were quite scary. We got used to them, as you get used to anything, but every night we used to get ready to go if the siren went. When London was being bombed really heavily that was in the early part, the second year of the war. The first year of the war nothing much happened in this country. After that, the Germans started bombing London and the cities, primarily London. But you could hear them coming and you always knew they were German planes because they sounded completely different to ours. Mostly they went over us to drop bombs on London but if they needed to unload or thought they had got far enough, they dropped them round about us. We used to hear the anti-aircraft guns starting up and going off, banging away quite close by

Q What do you remember about the end of the war?
A The last part of the war was when the doodle bugs used to come over; they were machines which didn’t have people in them; flying bombs. You would hear one coming and the engine would stop, so everybody stopped what they were doing and waited, until it went bang; it exploded somewhere. That was nasty because you knew they were going to come close to you and you never knew where. That was Hitler’s last effort to try and beat us.

Then at the end of the war I remember being outside Buckingham Palace, cheering away with millions of other people, masses and masses of soldiers, sailors and airmen and masses of Americans. Since about 1942 the Americans had been over here in great numbers doing all pretty much of the bombing of Germany.

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