I'm Jean Shapiro and I'm 84 years old. I was born in 1916, right in the middle of the first world war, so of course I have no memory of that but I did know an awful lot about it when I was growing up, because it was still very much in the minds of contemporaries of my parents.

And I became very politicised when I was quite young, adolescent. Largely because of what I knew about what had happened in the First World War and I was inclined to be a pacifist at that time, because I thought of the horrors of the war and I didn't want to be involved, alive even at the time when this was going to happen all over again.

But there was a very great difference I think between the reactions of people in Britain between how they felt and behaved between the two wars, the difference between their reaction at the declaration of war in 1939 where most people were sort of expecting it, sort of prepared, not totally, but sort of prepared for it to be unavoidable but a kind of grim feeling of acceptance. Whereas, as I understood it and heard about it in the First World War the reaction was, out on the streets, cheering and shouting and "we'll all be home by Christmas" sort of attitude. That did not happen at any time I think during the Second World War.

When I heard the declaration of war, I was in my flat in central London, and I heard this on the radio. I was by myself, my husband was working, that was a Sunday and he was working on the Sunday, so I was alone when I heard this. And there was this declaration which I had expected. Neville Chamberlain announced that we were now at war. Within a very short time there was an air raid warning, and so I departed from my flat which was on the second floor down to the ground floor which I thought would be safer, "this was bound to be a bomb any moment now", I thought, and I went in to take shelter in the nearest place I could get into, which was an empty cafe that was on the ground floor of my building. So I went there whilst the air raid warning was on, naturally expecting the worst, but after a while nothing happened and then there was an all clear. So that was my memory of how I heard of the declaration of war.

The following days were interesting in that everybody was expecting something terrible to happen and it didn't. We were going around bearing over our shoulders the cardboard boxes of, I'm trying to remember the name of it, gas masks, sorry, gas masks. And we carried these round with us for a while but everybody got a bit fed up of them, they were very clumsy and awkward to carry in their boxes, so after probably a week you saw very few of these boxes on the streets. Then there followed a very interesting time when people were joining up, volunteering, or waiting to be called up. Very early in that period I volunteered to join the Women's Land Army because I realised that I was going to lose my job as a journalist during the war because there was going to be a shortage of paper and there were going to be all sorts of restrictions and difficulties. So I resigned my job and attempted to join up but I failed to do so because although I was now unemployed, I was regarded as a journalist and therefore was not allowed. It was an occupation which was reserved, journalism, and so I went on the dole. I wasn't accepted at the Land Army, I'd already given up my job and so I became unemployed for a period of a few months.

I was living in a cottage in the country, pregnant, my only companion being a dog that I acquired from a dogs' home, and I spent several weeks or maybe months there on my own, but I began to feel that this was not a sensible thing, that eventually I must have somebody with me, and through an advertisement I got somebody, a woman with a small child, to come and share the cottage with me. I was extremely poor at the time, I had only the allowance, the army allowance that my husband acquired through being married. It was I think only something like 23 shillings a week, I can't remember but that was a very very little money for me and my dog, it was pretty inadequate. However, I did survive it. But the pregnancy unfortunately was ended by the birth of a child, a girl, with spina bifida. Now I had never heard of spina bifida before, I knew nothing about it, nothing at all about it. I gave birth apparently quite normally, I didn't know what the procedure would be at that time. The baby was whipped away from me without my seeing her, and all I heard was some crying which I thought was perfectly normal. However, about half an hour or an hour, I can't remember, after I'd had the baby, a doctor came along and told me, "I'm afraid I have to tell you that your baby's not going to survive", and I wouldn't believe him. I said, "but I heard that baby crying. It must be alive." "Well, you know, it may last three or four days, I don't know, I can't tell you, but it has spina bifida and don't worry, you've got twenty more years of childbearing before you, you'll be okay, goodbye." And that was more or less the last I saw of him. The baby did in fact die after five days, which is what I expected. And I was extremely aware that the baby had been not fed, just been allowed boiled water.

I then had considerable struggles with the nursing staff there, who were very anxious for me to get this baby christened and as I was complete non-believer I didn't want the baby to be christened, I didn't want anything to do with it at all. However, the nurses eventually wore me down and told me that I would be condemning this child to purgatory etc and so I said okay, get on with it, do what you like but it's nothing to do with me, I'm not going to be present, I didn't want to see this baby. According to modern thought this was quite wrong but this is how I felt at the time, and in fact the baby did die, was christened and eventually I left hospital to go back to this cottage, where meanwhile the air raids being on and the aircraft passing straight overhead, my tenant had left, she'd gone off with her child somewhere else. So there I was, left by myself in the cottage in the middle of a flight path in fact. And before very long there was a bomb, unexploded bomb in the next field to me and I was evacuated overnight to stay in the village, fairly near to where I lived, and the unexploded bomb was dealt with and I was able to go back but only temporarily to this cottage before I decided to move. And after a long business of trying to find somewhere to live and because on the whole the bombing had become less frequent and less serious, in the end, after various moves and so on, I came back to London and there were periods then when I was… periodically there would be bombs, but on the whole I was, I was unaffected. Because in the meantime I had had another baby, though I'd been told it was unwise so soon after the loss of a first, but I had this baby and when there was finally a major lull in the overhead war we both came back to London and there we were sharing a flat with a friend of mine.

During that next period there were various minor raids, night time raids mainly, but there were long periods when nothing happened of that kind. But now I was back in London and back in what was really the environment that I was most familiar with, I began, despite having this child, I began to take up various political activities again, one of which was joining with other women, led I suppose by a small group of communist women including myself. We undertook to refurbish, clean up and prepare a building which had had some earlier use I think for some kind of institution but we were prepared to make it ready to be taken over by the local council as a day nursery for working women to leave their children, which we eventually did. It involved scrubbing floors, painting, decorating, all sorts of activities that probably none of us had ever done anything like before. But we got on with it and we did it. At the same time, having involved ourselves in other forms of activity - speaking at meetings and agitating in various ways because we were, at this point in the war, we were supporting the fight of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. And the main focus of our activities was a demand for an opening of a second front against the Nazi government and the German population.

We did this right up until the end of the war in fact, but this period was getting towards the end of the war and eventually of course the second front was opened, there was an invasion in the west rather than just from the east, and that in a sense was the end of the Nazi regime.

While I was in London over this period when there was a certain amount of bombing going on but not regularly. I found myself a job, a journalist job, working for a left-wing news agency and I had a lot of work to do in relation to reporting for a readership in Australia, New Zealand and Canada on what was going along, was going, happening in Britain at the time with a particular bias towards left-wing activities. So that some news would be not just the official Ministry of Information news but would get to the population of these countries.

That was again, it was a time of relative peace as far as the individual was concerned, and this is how I lived with my little boy. However, at a later stage in this period the flying bombs started, and this made a very big difference to everybody's life, particularly of course in London where they were directed. Because I had a child, I was allocated a place in a deep shelter. Now this was a really very deep shelter, I think it would probably have been put into use in the 70s and 80s as a shelter for the government etc in the event of nuclear war, that's what we were told anyway, that that would happen. But I'm now talking of course about the second world war and so with my little boy I had to go to the shelter every night from 6pm until 6am when we had to leave.

I found this an extremely stressful and difficult period because not only had I got a job, had I had to queue on Saturdays, which was my only time away from work, for a tomato or an extra egg or something, something above the rations which were pretty stringent at that time, but I had of course the child to look after when he was not at his day nursery, and well it was hard. Added to that of course was the fact that this deep shelter was populated almost entirely by women with young children like myself, but the children were rushing around, tearing around, shouting and laughing and talking all night, as indeed were the adults. My little boy was used to going to bed at a regular hour and so on, and so he wasn't used to this kafuffle that was going on at night, and I certainly wasn't either. So I got very very little sleep bearing in mind that I had all these other responsibilities that I was carrying on with during the day, and so once a week I took my safety and my son's safety in my hands and went back to my second floor flat just so that I would get one night's sleep.

At that time also I had another alarming experience. I was working, I was working shifts and I had somebody to look after the child while I was not available. And on one occasion I came back at 11 o'clock at night, expecting to find my child in bed with the minder still looking after him, but when I arrived at the station I was confronted with the minder, who was supposed to be looking after my child, having been caught in my flat with a raid, an air raid. She'd taken fright, she'd run away, she'd come to the shelter of the tube station, the underground station, and leaving the child alone. Well I didn't stop to argue with her, I just was so dumbfounded that I got up out of the air raid, out of the tube station and dashed home whilst there was an air raid on. In fact I got back to find this child asleep and perfectly all right, but it was one of the most unpleasant experiences I had because there was bombing going on all the time and anti-aircraft fire etc, so it was… that was a difficulty. I just have to leave to anybody who's interested in this, to think how I dealt with this woman the following day.

During the time when I was going with my child to the shelter, it became really impossible to consider carrying on in this way because we were both getting affected by this, particularly me, and so when the day nursery at which the child was, decided to evacuate out of London to Scotland, I arranged for him to go with this nursery and so he was in a safe place in Scotland and I was still in London because I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I had no right to escape in that way and therefore I should stick with my job in London.

During the time that he [my son] was in Scotland, I had met and joined forces with an airman who was in the air force at the time in bombers, and having already decided that my relationship with my first husband was not going to work, I joined forces with Monty, this airman and over a period of some months we met up and formed this relationship, which in fact lasted until his death in the year 2000.

I was not unaware of the fact that he was going to be in considerable danger, at enormous risk. He was on daylight raids and on each occasion when he went on a raid, which was mainly over Holland, he came back as one of the few who had been on this raid who had not been shot down. Finally, he was shot down on an occasion when twelve bombers were assigned to bomb a target, an industrial target in Holland, and one aircraft had engine trouble and turned back. Of the eleven that went on to do what they were assigned to do, or to attempt to do it, all eleven were shot down, most of the crews were killed, the aircraft of course were, had disintegrated, or gone on fire, and his pilot managed after very great difficulties to land with their air gunner shot dead, the rest of them wounded, two with broken limbs, broken legs, and Monty with a very severe wound in his left arm. They were picked up, they landed in what appeared to have been allotments, they were picked up by local people and comforted, because clearly they were in no position to run away, they were all very badly wounded, and they were picked up by local people who comforted them and looked after them as best they could until a German party arrived and they were taken off to hospital. They were in hospital in Amsterdam for quite a while all of them, but not all together, in different raids I believe.

Now Monty was Jewish, and this was a matter of enormous interest to the staff of this hospital [in Amsterdam], because of course they were told that Jews were cowardly, they never did any fighting, they just made money out of war and so on. And now, strangely enough to these people, there was a Jewish airman. What, you know, how could this be, and so he became a matter of enormous interest to the staff of the hospital, mainly Germans of course, who came and sort of put their heads round the door just to have a look at this amazing sight, these Jewish airmen, which was quite an interesting thing for him.

However, he recovered to some extent, he was patched up a little bit, he was operated on on his arm without anaesthetics, the explanation being that they were short of anaesthetics and obviously Germans had priority. He was then sent to one or two different prison camps and landed up in what was quite a famous POW camp, Luft 3 and because he was so badly wounded he was eventually repatriated to the UK on an exchange. So that although he was shot down in the May, not the next September but the September after that, he found himself back in the UK.

He was then given leave, he was patched up, had been patched up by the Germans. He was given leave I think for a couple of weeks before of course, having to go into an RAF hospital to be properly operated on and hopefully cured, well not cured but patched up sufficiently well to lead a normal life. Which of course didn't happen because he was so badly wounded that he had to be in plaster for a very very long time after that, in fact a couple of years, until he was finally released from hospital.

But it was during the time that he was there that I became pregnant by him and he visited me off and on. I visited him once, I also had visits to organise to go and see my son in Scotland so I was travelling around in rather difficult conditions, wartime conditions on trains in order to visit these two people, and this is what I did. The situation as far as daily living was concerned was just as bad if not worse than it had been earlier in the war, when it was necessary to queue for practically every commodity or product that one wanted and the rationing was even more stringent than it had been earlier.

At the end of the war, Monty was still in hospital. He eventually came out, having been really more or less taken out of plaster completely but still having his arm in plaster, and he immediately looked round and got himself a suitable job. He had been a clinical psychologist and he went back to that discipline. And I now had these two children to look after, which I did, and so that within two years of the end of the war we were back to living hat was in many respects a normal life.