Mrs. Payne

We were at home, it was on Sunday wasn't it? September. We were all at home I know when Mr. Chamberlain said we were at war with Germany. I can hear him saying it, we had one of these old sort of wirelesses that you had to have a battery to, you know, you had to have batteries at the back of it...we all sat around listening.

Anon

It was the 3 September 1939, I was terrified - the first air raid we had at home - my husband was in the Army and I had this little boy. My cousin was sleeping with me in this cottage and we got up and we'd go blackouts. We were that frightened we daren't put the electric light on, we got a candle 'cos the fire had gone out you know, there were no electric heaters in those days. So it were cold. Daren't fetch the boy out of bed because he had bronchitis if he got cold. We made some tea and I held my gown around the stove - I mean it's laughable isn't it - so he couldn't see up there. I mean it was stupid. And I got that cold that when we got back into bed we couldn't sleep could we and when we went to work the next day we felt no good. So I said to my cousin, 'I've made up my mind, I'm going to stay in bed. If he bombs us I shall be with the baby, we'll die together.' She said, 'I'm not getting up either.' Course she didn't stop long with me she went into munitions, she left me on my own like. My second baby died sudden in my arms with a bad heart. Sent for my husband home form North Africa, he never come, and for weeks he was writing to me as if the baby was still alive and I didn't hear from him when he was at the front and I thought I'd lost him as well.

I had an evacuee after that. I had a girl for a start, then her mother fetched her back to London to look 
after her baby sister, then I had the brother. The girl was alright but she

 had ticks in her head when I first had her. When I had the lad he came with this rubber sheet, and he must have been seven, and I said, 'What you got that for?' He said, 'To put on the bed...I wet the bed.' So I took him to the doctor. He said, 'We'll soon cure you m'duck, I'll give you some medicine and you get out of bed when your 'Auntie' goes to bed and she'll get you up in the morning.' And he didn't do it no more. He must have been embarrassed about it. That had been neglect somewhere hadn't it?

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Margery Milton

Well it were just black, it really was black. You had to get accustomed to the dark before you could really...even out of my own back door, I was going down the entry which I've done hundreds of times and I ran at the wall, you just couldn't see a thing. When I went into munitions up John Street I used to bike to work before eight o'clock in the morning during the blackout. I mean, there wasn't the traffic about obviously but it was a bit eerie.

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Margery Dorman (b.1915)

We rented the first house, up Wolvey Road near The Three Pots Hotel but it were a bit remote. You needed transport really but we hadn't got a car. We used to bike it a lot and use the buses. We were married in '37 and the war started in '39 and I was expecting a baby at the time and she was six month old when he went abroad and when he came home she were at school. Dreadful. He wrote regularly, me and his mother used to send parcels. When he went in the army I was on me own and then a Coventry family got bombed out and I took them in and let them use the house - there was a man, a woman and a daughter. I used to take mending, off from the factory, at home. Just got enough rations, you know. Sometimes, we'd got a miner lived next door and they used to get extra rations of meat stuff like that and she used to let me have some of her coupons and he used to get coal, plenty of coal - we were all right in that respect.