Sir, As the media has been full of reminisces of the mass evacuation of children at the beginning of the war, it awakened memories of how, as an evacuee, Tenby changed my life.

Fortunately I was not ripped apart from my family. My grandparents were Tenby born, but had moved to Birkenhead where my mother married my father and my sister Joyce and I were born.

As a five-year-old I spent the nights in the underground shelters which had been dug out in the local park as bombs destroyed much of the town.

My father, now in the ‘Home Guard’, stayed with my grandparents, and my mother took Joyce and I on the train to Tenby.

My only recollection of that day is sitting in ‘Somerville’ in Warren Street being given a meal by a great-aunt Edith Wellman.

Later it was decided we should move to 5 Park Road, home of my great-grandmother. It was a full house as my great-uncle Wallace Carew, who owned the butchers shop, and his sister Ethel had to also move in as their spacious home, 5 Belle Vue, had been requisitioned by the Army,

Mrs. Nicholls, who lived opposite at ‘Heathfield’, suggested I call for her daughter Anne to go to school and so started a friendship which lasts to this day.

I also attended the Baptist Sunday School with Anne (now Gerrard) and remember singing at the anniversary, though the star singer was Shirley Griffiths (now Wickland). I also enjoyed tea every Sunday at Heathfield, but am ashamed to admit I giggled uncontrollably when two-year-old David was invariably scolded by his mother.

My Sunday School teacher was Mrs. Lewis and I still have the book she gave me when we left Tenby. It had the inscription ‘May Barbara grow in the love and knowledge of the Lord.”

As the air raid shelters had not yet been completed in the school grounds, we all had to run to a basement in one of the nearby houses when the siren went.

I also remember being taken with the school to see ‘Dumbo’. Maybe I got hungry towards the end as I decided to go home, but my teacher stopped me and, luckily, my mother and sister happened to be passing so they took me safely home.

I never got to know if Dumbo had a happy ending.

I think my mother and sister found some respite from the war news at ‘Rebleen’ in South Cliff Street where grandad’s sister Edie Davies and husband Sidney lived. Half pennies and pennies were the stakes played for in card games such as Chase the Ace.

I have no recollection as to why Anne and I must have fallen out at one time. I just remembered my mother going straight across the road to ‘Healthfield’, soon to return saying ‘You’re friends again now.’ We have never had a quarrel since.

After 18 months, my mother decided it was time for us to return to Birkenhead as the bomb attacks were getting less frequent and my father had got a table which was reputedly bomb proof as you crawled under it during an air raid.

I remember my last evening as I felt very grown up as I was invited to a party given by one of Joyce’s friends at Greenhill Grammar School.

I have no recollection of the goodbyes or the train journey home, but Joyce later told me that as the train pulled out of Tenby station, I stated ‘When I am a big girl I am going to come and live in Tenby’.

And true to my word, I did, even though it was 1984 before my mother and I moved to our cottage on Marsh Road and I was able to contribute the Friday Fun page to the Observer for over 30 years.

Barbara Stredder,

Marsh?Road,

Tenby.