Sunday sept 3rd 1939 at 11am. I'd been to church and come back with Norman Hodgeson to his house when the siren went. It must have just been announced on the wireless. We were out back playing in the garden and I ran home because that is what you were told to do. The first nine months were called the phoney war because nothing happened. No bombing, only the threat. The Clementses were always talking about the war, but nothing really changed though. I went to school the next day, and not long after we received gas masks and air raid shelters. Anderson shelters were put up and we got two, facing each other, because of the size of the family. Council workers came to dig holes and put duck boards down to keep out of the water. They put paraffin lights and torches, bunk beds, food was rotated, and there was a primer stove to make tea. It wasn't a toy to be played in. It even had a curtain for black outs, but no door. When the bombing did start, some nights you would automatically go to the shelter for the evening, not bothering to wait for the siren. June 1940- I was 12 years old and was evacuated to Bix, Oxfordshire, in a nice little cottage. How we all squeezed in I’m not sure. First trip out to bix, we took a trolley bus to Chiswick and stood by the bus stop outside of the Times Furnishing Company. The building had been bombed recently by incendiary, only the front wall was still standing. I found it really fascinating, then the South Midland coach came and we got on and went to Henley on Thames. When the bombing eased up we went back to Twickenham. When it all started again, Mrs Clements decided to move out 7 miles from Henly on Thames to Pishill, Oxfordshire. Of course I called it "Piss hill." There was a little semi-detached cottage, no gas , no electricity, no running water. Old coal stove to cook on, drinking water from the well, washing up water from an old underground tank that used to fill up with water, and old paraffin candles. No bathroom, we bathed in the kitchen in an old tin tub. The outdoor toilet was quite a walk, and was used for both cottages. "Dan, Dan the lavatory man" had to come empty it. Hughes cow farm was right across the road. Talk about the dark ages! Harry and Alfie Cresswell lived in the cottage next door with their mum and dad. They had an older brother who was killed in the war at Dunkirk. Both Harry and Alfie worked on the Hughes’ farm. I used to help milk the cows, haymaking in the spring, bring the cows in. I was all new to me, seeing animals after being in Twickenham, though I had been to the Chessington Zoo. That’s the only time I had seen animals. The farm also had pigs. Jack and Daisy were lovely old cart horses who pulled the hay wagons and plowing if they got behind with the tractor. They had a Fordson tractor. There was a pub called the Crown. No electric, but there was a generator out in the barn. We could hear it chugging away every night. I used to get an old Bedford bus to go to school at Henley on Thames. It was across from a railway station. We had mixed classes, boys and girls, and the kids weren’t very friendly to us because we talked funny. I must have talked to a girl, and her friend told her not to talk to me, “he doesn’t even know what an MP is.” I answered, “yes I do, military police and member of parliament.” They just laughed and went on. Boys were a bit friendlier, as he remembers seeing a group of older boys sitting in a field a little away from the farm. I don’t remember the Clement’s girls going to school with me. Joan was getting on, much older than me. Audrey too, maybe. One Sunday morning I saw a Heinkle 111 up in the sky. It was so low that it scared me, I could see the pilot and everything. We were in a bit of a valley, and there was a bank of trees with a church nearby, as well as a gun emplacement manned by a sergeant major who was swearing his bloody head off. Not a shot was fired! That is the closest I’ve been to a German plane, but when they went over London, we used to collect the shrapnel and if they crashed a ways out there might have been papers and things. Another Sunday morning, a load of wagons came down the road, you could hear them rumbling, half tracks etc. A Canadian division stopped and asked if they could get water from the well. Ma said yes, so they opened the flap, and accidentally let the bucket all the way down the well without hanging on to the rope. They must have been city folks, because they hadn’t used a well before. I don’t know how they ever got the bucket again, but they must have somehow. We all laughed about it. I was out there nosing around cause I was interested in the army and their guns and trucks. Four teenage girls, Ma Clements and cows are not that exciting. Mr Clements stayed and worked in London as a painter and decorator for the Teddington film studios (which is now Warner Brothers), he had been there for as long as can be remembered. I don’t remember ever seeing him while evacuated. He joined the home guard. He was a sergeant in the first world war, so he must have known something about it, so they made him a sergeant in the home guard which was first called LDV (Local Defense Volunteer, or as the kids referred to it- look, duck and vanish). When they finished playing soldiers, they went down to the pub, especially on Sunday. Sunday was for church not the pub. The pub was the Jolly Blacksmith, at the bottom of the road. As well as the Lord Nelson, and the Five Oaks and the Fountain. With one on each corner, you always had somewhere to go on a Sunday. Mr Clements was always good to me. What a gent, smashing. It was mrs clements that was rotten to me. Always getting hit with a hairbrush on my bare bum when I was little. Doing all the dirty chores, just not being treated like one of her own. Mr clements may have felt sorry for me, but he didn’t like to upset the household.