Joyce Jones was a teenager when the second world war broke out, and as soon as she was 18 in 1941 she ‘joined up’ with much enthusiasm. She remembers the shelters in the cloakroom underneath her school, and although her family had an Anderson shelter in their garden she says that after the initial sense of danger wore off, people used them infrequently and preferred to stay in bed when the siren went. As a radar engineer, Joyce worked in Britain and abroad to defend the country from incoming enemy planes.

Mrs Jones’s husband Pat was still a young boy in 1939, and remembers the excitement felt by children like him when war was declared. He attended Brunswick School and recalls the bad smell of the air-raid shelters in the school grounds. The shelters were used for lots of practice drills but there were few real attacks. At home his family sheltered under the stairs during air-raid warnings, and they built a special miniature shelter for their cat in a suitcase, complete with a blast tunnel, cushion, and electric light!