During the war Dad was an ARP warden. He had to be on duty some evenings, checking blackouts in people’s houses. I can remember one sunny afternoon a German plane came over our house, so low you could see the swastika on the side. Dad ran indoors for his gun. A small British plane crashed on our farm but unfortunately I missed it as I was at Grandmother’s. We enjoyed sourcing the site for remains of the aeroplane glass.

World War 2 changed our lives. We had lots of evacuees in the village from London. They even brought a teacher with them – Miss Goldstein. She would wipe the blackboard with a wet mop, but before doing so, she always drew the Hitler’s face and then erased it with great pleasure.

Two families of evacuees were allocated to us, but they only stayed two weeks. There were no buses, no shops. It was not the life for them. We had a searchlight battery nearby and two prison camps, Italian and German. German troops to work on the farm. They were brought in a truck with a billy can in which Mother had to cook potatoes in for their lunch. She added chunks of home cured ham.

At school the boys’ and girls’ playgrounds were separate. In the girls’ playground we played skipping games with a long rope and chanted rhymes as we skipped. The playground chants were the soundtrack of our childhood. “All in together this fine weather…Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around…The big ship sails through the Alley Alley oh.”

When convoys of American soldiers passed by, we clung to the railings waving to them. They in turn, threw us packets of Horlicks tablets.

My first classroom was in the cloakroom due to expansion of the evacuees. Mid-morning we had Horlicks to drink in mugs with nursery rhymes on them. We learned to read from books called Old Lob.

We had to carry our gas masks in a box on our backs every day. A gas van came to school periodically to test us in our gasmasks. Cod liver oil and rosehip syrup was distributed from school. We had coupons in our ration books for the younger children.

The playground surface was gravel in those days. We scraped shapes in it to make houses to play in. When war came, the headmaster (whose house adjoined the playground) had no petrol for his grass cutter so we cut his lawns at playtime with scissors and sheep shears. We also sorted paper for salvage and collected rose hips. Telfers meat pies and pork pies and Cadbury’s chocolate were sold on Fridays at school. One of our farmworkers ordered pies, which we had to take him along with his newspaper from the paper shop.

The dentist’s van came to school occasionally. The dentist took one of my front teeth out because he said they were too crowded. When the second tooth came through there was not enough room as the gap had closed, so it grew inside the rest. That meant I needed yet another extraction.