"My mother was very nervous about the war and I was evacuated to Oxford and then to Wales. I came back towards end, but I remember the doodlebugs.
"We used to sleep under the arches. We called them 'Old Ram' mum had chest trouble and couldn't run very fast and when the air raid started going she would panic,"Come on Iris, let's go" and then we would run round to the arches and guns would be going, you could hear the planes and knew the bombs would be comming over. In the end we slept down in the arches, it wasn't very pleasant. We'd come out every morning and then I got what they called 'shelter feet' and I had big yellow festers, that was the War for us, under the Arches, opposite The Ram. We did have great fun, we were just kids.
"In the Arches there was one big room. There was a coffee bar and we would have a cup of Oxo at night and I used to look forward to that Oxo. There was a gramophone and records and it used to be great, it was fun. Us kids enjoyed that. It didn't matter what was going on outside."
- IB
"I was about five and I remember the bomb siren went one day and we was just behind the pub, down the road, the Albert, and my mother's going frantic, my mother's up and down the road, while the bombs was dropping, looking for me, and all of a sudden, she heard, "come on boys, it's all clear now- the all-clear sign went on". And we just walked out as though there was nothing- nothing going on. The place got destroyed, all the houses got destroyed, by the bombing, there was not one left standing the only thing left standing down my road was the brick shelter."
- MG
