About the contributor

M.Davies Cefn Mawr,North Wales
I went to Grammar School for the first time on the Tuesday after war was declared. In many ways it was a blight on our school lives. We had to get used to shortages and living with a certain amount of fear and disruption. There was a shortage of books and paper. There was a tennis court but no equipment, so none of us learned to play tennis. There had been a tradition of performing one-act plays but we had no after-school activities because there was blackout and air raids tended to be in the evenings. I do think the war was used as an excuse for the imposition of some deprivations! Perhaps these things were good for our character development, because we appreciated things when we did have them and learnt to be careful with everything. I still save brown paper and string! We did not mind when velour hats became unobtainable and we were allowed berets instead!
A measure of the seriousness of life was that, if we forgot our gas-masks, we were sent home to fetch them even though most of us lived two miles away. We were given extra clothing coupons if we were over a certain height and really we had very few clothes except our school uniforms.
One strange aspect of experience was that we had very close friends among the evacuees from Liverpool and London, but suddenly, when the bombing stopped, they disappeared and we never saw nor heard of most of them again.