“I’m sure it was a Sunday, and one of the men from further down the place came and told my father, because there was very few people had a wireless then, or a radio, and he must have heard that war had been announced …  I always remember that, because my father was very thrown, ‘cause he had come through the First … the Great War.  He had come through that and had been wounded three times. 

I remember us being issued with gas-masks and things when I was still in the school.  Gas-masks and the blackouts on the school and that sort of thing.

And then we all had to do our bit gathering all the rubbish we could find around the place that was tin or iron or old, rusty stuff and that was all collected and taken away for the war effort. 

We didn’t like to hear planes going over at night, you know, in the dark, because we were always thinking they were Germans.”