"As a six year old child I was evacuated to a small village named Llansaint, in South West Wales. I lived with a family named Phillips/Philips, who owned a sweet shop and sold other bits and pieces.

"We arrived at Kidwelly station around seven in the evening and we were all taken to a chapel somewhere in Kidwelly where we waited till nearly midnight for people to come and collect us and take us to their homes which were called billets. I was with my sister who was about three at the time and she was taken in by a farmer and his wife in Llansaint, just around the corner to my new home. Why we were not billeted together I will never know, although we visited each other quite frequently.

"As time went by I made many friends with the local Welsh children. One of them, a boy about my age took me to a field full of sheep one day and showed me how the local kids rode on the sheep's backs and played cowboys and indians. When my turn came I managed to straddle the back of a sheep and off I rode across the field.

"That night a rather angry farmer knocked on the door where I lived and asked to see the little London boy. I couldn't think what he wanted me for but I went to the door acompanied by my foster parent, Mrs Phillips. The farmer growled, that's him, the little monster, and he began a tirade of angry words against me about riding on his sheep in the field. I wasn't aware that one of the sheep died that evening, and another kid told him it was the one that I rode. I was really too young to understand the full implication of it all, but my foster mother apologised to the farmer who, she told me later was a very coarse, aggressive individual who hated children anyway. I was quite frightened by him and his shouting at the door.

"It all blew over eventually and I was kept in for a week and not allowed to play with the little gang of cowboys that had taken me to the field in the first place. I thought that riding sheep was a normal practice, as I came from London and was not accustomed to country village games like that. This man gave me a bad impression of Welsh people in general which stuck with me for many years after."

"After two years in the village my mother wanted me back home in London. It was now 1943. She sent me a 14 shilling postal order for my fare back home by train from Kidwelly station. My foster mother took me to the station. All I had was in my little old attache case which I had left London with two years earlier. As I got into the carriage all alone I glanced at Mrs Phillips and she was in tears, and waving me goodbye. The train eventually puffed out of the station and I was on my way back to Paddington Station, where I had left from in 1941.

" When I arrived in London my older brother was at the station to meet me. We went to a WVS stall just outside the station and had a cup of tea each and a paste sandwich. It was as we were leaving the stall that the air raid warning siren sounded. I had heard it before so I knew what to expect. We spotted a concrete, public air raid shelter just a few yards from the station and we both dived in. We could hear the intermittent drone of the German bombers above us and we waited for the inevitable whistle of the bombs as they screamed earthwards. The noise was terrific, bombs were falling everywhere and one string of incendiary bombs hit the station platform causing several fires.

" After the all clear sounded we both made our way to the nearest bus stop and waited for a bus to take us to Oxford Street, and from there we got a bus to Tottenham, where we lived, or I thought we did. Imagine my shock when my brother told me that our home was now in a reception centre as our house had been demolished while I had been in Wales, by a V1 pilotless plane full of explosives that just glided to earth when the engine cut out. It had fallen 300 yards from our house but it had devastated nearly six rows of houses. My family were all sheltering in the Manor House, London Underground station when it fell, lucky for them.

" After the war we all had street parties all over London. Our house was never properly rebuilt but we had to go back there for two years until we were re-housed in a much better property.

" If anyone can remember me in Llansaint I would like to hear from them. Two women, possibly in the 30s then used to take me down to the beach and we'd gather sacks of clay from the beach area, take it back home and mix the clay with coal dust to make coal eggs for the fire. They glowed very well and kept us warm in those dark and austere days of WW2. We also collected cockles galore from the same nearby beach. Llansaint holds some powerful memories for me as a child.

"My sister stayed there until the end of the war, 1945, and when she came home she told me that the farmer who's sheep died was the same farmer who she lived with, and his wife. She told me he was cursing the cockney kid over the incident but she never told him I was her brother for sometime until he calmed down a bit.

" As kids in Llansaint, we kept warm while we were out playing in the winter nights by puncturing a small tin with holes, putting some small pieces of coal in it on top of some pieces of wood and then lighting it all. When the coal was glowing we would swing it round on a piece of attached wire until the whole tin glowed red. We'd then us it to warm ourselves, especially our hands. That was a Welsh trick. We had never heard of it in London, but we soon spread the word around to all our London mates. That was the beginning of the, what we called, winter warmers, in London, and we lit them all over the place, mainly on the bombsites where we'd play for hours on end."

Jim Hepting