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Margaret Smith

War broke out on 3rd of September 1939, and I turned 10 on 5th of September 1939, having just commenced attending Hove County Grammar School for Girls. I hadn't sat for the scholarship as I was a year too young, but my parents wanted me to stay with my fellow classmates - so paid for me to attend until I could sit the “intermediate” two years later. I remember my mother writing out that first cheque for £4.12s.6d for one term.

That morning was the first time I had seen my father cry - saying “this was never supposed to happen”. He had served right through the Great War 1914-18, aged 17- 21 in the East Lancashire Fusiliers in France, Belgium, Egypt, the Dardanelles etc and was on the Red Cross hospital boat with influenza when peace was declared. He had lost so many good friends during that four-year period of ‘the war to end all wars’!

In March 1940 I was evacuated with about half my school to Settle in Yorkshire - the boys’ grammar having also gone north to Lancashire, from where we had moved south in 1934 for a better quality of life and more prospects for ‘advancement’! My sister Sheila aged five had been left with my grandparents in Southport as her infant school was built next to a huge gasometer - a likely target for bombing!

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My first real memory as an evacuee was four of us girls standing in a line in the church hall in Langcliffe village and four local ladies choosing which girl to take. I was then a scrawny, freckled, red-headed child and therefore the last of the four to be chosen with my future mother saying “well, I suppose I will have to have this one then”! Shared a single

bed - top to toe - with their daughter Eva, two thin blankets, no pillow, until the red cross lady came with reinforcements. However, I am still in touch with Eva after all those years.

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The house was in a lovely position, halfway between Langcliffe and Stainthorpe with the beautiful river Ribble at the bottom of the field behind their garden and where I spent many happy hours playing. The river was shallow with huge boulders so when it wasn't running too fast, I could cross to the other side!  I returned to Hove a year later to sit the intermediate exam and there is my next vivid memory. We were in the school playing field - a hockey match against Worthing High School and winning when the sirens went off – but because they were a daily occurrence the PE teacher didn't send us to the shelters. A lone German aircraft flew in and round and round the field machine gunning us, and miraculously no one was hit but I so vividly remember lying flat on my stomach on damp grass, hands over my ears, praying hard and hoping someone would put Lilies of the Valley on my grave!! 

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A few years later I took my School Cert exams in the air raid shelters - so different to nowadays. 12 subjects!

In the house we had an enormous Morrison steel air raid shelter in our dining room with a double mattress inside it and on which my sister Sheila (also now home again) and I slept. Another one (mattress) on top for our parents if things got too “noisy”. We were under one of the many routes to London and could see the red glow from fires there very clearly. Another “incident” was again during a quiet air raid, sitting having lunch - watching a parachute floating down and a pair

of boots disappearing  over our roof - all rushing into the back garden to find an airman, still clutching his rifle, sitting up in an apple tree. Mother put on the kettle for the poor man for a cup of tea!! True northern hospitality regardless! The pilot, a Polish man, threw his rifle down to Daddy with the caution “be careful it's loaded”, not knowing of course that he was a first World War Veteran and had handled many guns in his youth. 

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A huge map of Europe was on our kitchen wall with flags on pins which were moved every day according to progress or otherwise. Father in his ill-fitting Home Guard uniform going off on manoeuvres, my task of drawing blackout curtains each night, not a chink of light to be shown, Sheila and I with torches, reading our books under the bedclothes. Mother eking out our rations and still managing to always have scones in the cake tin for our many visitors - mostly from the Lancastrian Society of Sussex which they had founded when first moving to Hove.  Eventually it had in excess of 300 members. The ladies section met at a cafe on Western Road in Brighton for afternoon tea once a month whilst knitting for the troops. At weekends in the summer and petrol allowing, out would come Daddy's precious little old Austin 7 or our bicycles and off we’d go to a cricket match in Poynings over the Downs or Rottingdean for cricket matches with the Yorkshires, Scottish, and Devonian societies. Every other weekend it was a musical evening at one or another's home - Daddy singing, Mother and I playing the piano and Sheilaon the violin, her violin case usually stuffed full of ‘cut out’ dollies and their clothes! Always so creative my sister! We couldn't of course use our beach hut all through the war, as the beaches were full of barbed wire and tank traps, and Hove beach was next door to Shoreham harbour where many of the invasion barges and such were assembled. There were tanks down every road and troops everywhere also, making ready for D-day, France being only a short pop across the channel.

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I don't really remember much about VE Day - wasn't allowed to go down into town of course but there was much emotion. When VJ Day arrived though, it took quite a while to get homes and gardens clear of blackout paraphernalia etc.

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