During the war I was brought up in Swansea and I lived two doors away from my old school which is the school you can see at the top of the hill, it was called the Round Top. The school was built in 1932, there was also a school right behind it and it was built of all timber and tarmac and all that sort of stuff.

During the blitz in Swansea, they bombed the wooden school with incendiary bombs. Now I only lived two doors away, we were in a shelter at the time, and then of course the thing went up in flames. The National Fire Service turned up to put the fire out. While they were putting the fire out, the German planes were coming down and machine-gunning the fire fighters, so they had to scarper and they ran into our shelter and they stayed there then until it was safe to get out, and put the fire out the following day.

So the three nights blitz was very vivid. We used to go down the air-raid shelter early every evening about six o'clock, we went down whether they was a raid on or not. And remembering the blitz, we had a chap living next door to us who was an air-raid warden and he used to walk over near this school and he could see the whole of Swansea. Then he would come back and give us a detailed account of where the bombs were dropping in Swansea, they just bombed the docks and they bombed Marks & Spencers and all that sort of thing.

So as soon as the three day blitz was over, we'd had enough, so my mother hoisted us all away and off we went to relatives in Dorset, up in England. So we stayed there for a few months and then we came back. Now when we came back, our school had been evacuated, so they said you have to be evacuated, so we went to a different school, St. Illtyd's from over St. Thomas, and we went from the station just around the corner, Victoria Station in Swansea which is no longer there now. So off we went, my sister and I, to be evacuated. And there we were with our gas masks, our little tags on our epaulettes, so off we went, and I was evacuated two million miles away to Ammanford(!), to a young lad of about seven years of age, it was a long way away.

When we got off the train, all these children, must have been about a hundred of us altogether, and then people came and took the children away, because they were already allocated, but my sister and I weren't allocated because we were two extras.

So we were the last two sitting there and this lady came along who was in charge, she brought a chap along with her, and he had, I always remember he was wearing a long coat, and he looked at us and he said, 'I'd like to take the little girl,' he said, 'but I don't want the boy.' He didn't want me. Apparently they'd already, previously had two boys down from London and they'd wrecked his place. So anyway, strict instructions, we weren't to be separated. 'Oh, alright,' he said, 'come on.'

So he took my sister and I and off to his house. When the car arrived outside the house in Ammanford, his wife was waiting for a little girl and I got out of the car first, of course her face dropped, and then when she saw my sister then, she was delighted. So these two people they were so good to us, they became Uncle Tom and Aunty Vi and they were two wonderful people. We were there for a couple of years in Ammanford and I've got wonderful memories of these people that looked after us. And eventually then when everything had subsided in Swansea, we came back, we came back to Swansea, and everything went on as normal.

And the next thing I really remember about the war was back to the Round School again which is at the top. We were round there one day, this must have been 1945 I suppose, and we looked out to the channel and the channel was black with ships, it looked as if you could walk across them. So we were all excited about this. Of course, this was leading up to D-Day, so the following morning we all got up and ran round to see these ships and there wasn't a ship in sight. The whole lot had moved out overnight and there'd been Americans as well stationed, lots of Americans stationed in Swansea at the time, and of course they'd all gone, gone to D-Day.

Also during these wartime years, I went to a birthday party up the road from where we were living and we all had bananas and custard and we were so delighted, we'd never tasted bananas before.

We all went home, told our parents we'd had bananas and custard. So there was a big hue and cry in the district, where did this lady get her bananas from, 'cause there was probably not a banana in the country. So anyway, next thing we knew, a policeman came up and he interviewed this lady, wanted to know where she got her bananas from. And it turned out she'd got parsnips, she'd peeled them, sliced them through like bananas, soaked them in banana essence and served them up as bananas and custard!. So that was our first introduction ever to a banana!