I was born in Mayhill. I was there for the Three Nights Blitz which was terrible, when they used to drop bombs on Swansea; they used to come down like baskets of fairy lights. My father thought we were being gassed, because the sky was black and the cordite, the smell was terrible.

A few days later or it could have been a week or two, I was evacuated from Mayhill School, which was built the same year I was born, 1932, and we all stood on the kerb with our gas masks and our luggage labels stuck with our name and address in our coat. I can remember it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and it was two single-decker buses and they took us to Crwbin in Carmarthenshire and the noise in the classroom was terrible, because there were lots of children. There was this lady, she wasn't very big, but she had authority. We found out later she was a school teacher and she was organising them.

I must have looked pathetic; Mona went home, over a mile home, to her mother, to ask her if I could stay with them. So I did, I was nine when I went, I was eleven when I came back, I didn't want to come back, I was the last to come back, I believe the other girl, she was adopted by the people that took her. I was three-stone-five when I went and I was five-stone-three when I came back. Isn't it daft how I remember little details?

They were marvellous, in fact I still phone the children. They all spoke Welsh and when I came back I was speaking Welsh, sadly, I lost it, I can still understand it, but I've lost a lot of it, but oh Auntie, she taught us, she had marvellous values and her father, Tad-cu, the old man, he used to keep the pig in the shed and he was lovely to talk to and Uncle he had silicosis. Auntie was a hard-working woman, but she taught me to knit, oh she was marvellous to me, absolutely marvellous, I didn't want to come back.

Auntie bought me an autograph book when I was evacuated and everybody that I knew signed the autograph book which is now in Swansea Museum. The neighbours signed it and there's some little funny things in it like, 'God made Hitler, he made him on a fence, he made him in a hurry and forgot to give him sense'. Another one is a picture of a black cat, 'Look out in the blackout' and then the other one that tickled one of the girls in the Museum was, 'The devil sends naughty winds, to blow our skirts knee-high, but God is just, he sends the dust, to blow in bad men's eyes'. Some of the teachers from my school drew pictures.

I had four brothers and one was a Desert Rat and won a military medal for blowing up a German bunker, one was a prisoner of war, one of them was a despatch rider for Monty and I've got a letter from him and the other was an ordinary soldier.

When my brother Ivor came back from the prisoner of war camp, they put out the flags for him of course, and he brought a bit of banana for me and I didn't know what you had to do with it, I just looked at it. I honestly didn't know what you had to do with a banana! Everybody put the flags out, but when he came home, his stomach couldn't take the food, so he had to go back in hospital for a while and he wouldn't talk about it, he used to say the cat went missing and things like that, but he would never talk about it.

My other brother, the eldest one, Dai, David, he was a maverick, after the war, it was too quiet and he went to Cyprus as a prison warden. He had joined the army at 14 and my father had to go and get him back out because 14 is too young.

Dai was the eldest and a Desert Rat. Alfie was the despatch rider for Monty and Ivor, he was in a prisoner of war camp, Stalag VIIIB having been captured at Dunkirk. The other one was Freddie who was nineteen when he was called up.