Born in 1915, Peter was 24 when the war began. He signed up for the Navy but was discharged because of illness. He went back to his career as an actor, performing in London during the Blitz and touring around the country. Towards the end of the war he ran a repertory theatre company in Worthing, then full of Soviet soldiers, captured by the Germans and then liberated by Allied troops. He discovered their wonderful singing and brought them into the theatre to sing. After the war he joined Olivier and Richardson on their tour of Richard III for Allied troops in Germany and France.

Born in 1934, Shosh was five at the start of the war and the strange strictures of wartime England were her "normality". Evacuated from London to Royston with her school, she was joined there by her mother, who got a job in the Food Office. She remembers the rationing, the war propaganda posters, and incomprehensible adult conversations about the progress of the war. The arrival of American troops, with Hershey bars and chewing gum, was a source of great excitement; and later the Italian and German PoWs a source of bewilderment and pity.

Born in 1921, Jane was 18 when the war began. After leaving the Sadler's Wells Ballet School in 1939, she went to Zurich to learn German, followed by a secretarial course. In February 1940 she was invited to work at Bletchley Park, in Hut 6. The German Enigma code had just been broken, and in the Machine Room, where Jane and her colleagues worked, the encoded messages, sometimes from the German High Command, were decoded and turned into German. Shifts were long, and conditions spartan. Secrecy was vital and from 1940 until giving this testimony, Jane has never spoken, even to her husband, about this work.

Born in 1921, Ted was eighteen when the war began. He joined the Navy immediately and saw active service throughout the entire war. He was on various patrols in coastal waters and recalls the inadequacy of British defences during the early months of the war. He was part of the Pedestal convoy to relieve Malta; his ship escorted the disabled oil tanker, Ohio; he was responsible for going out in the whaler to rescue seaman in the water from other ships that had been sunk. He later took part in the bombardment of the Normandy coast during the D-Day landings of 1944.

Now aged 98, Norman was a Congregational Minister at the start of the war and a member of the Christian Left movement, which worked to warn of the danger of Fascism. Norman's church was allocated a coachload of bombed out people from the East End, and new homes were found for them. Soon after, he gave up his ministry and became one of H.M. Factories Inspectors working mostly in the East End of London, overseeing working conditions. He remembers the air raid shelters and the V1s and V2s that rained devastation over London, as well as moments of consolation like Myra Hess's lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery.

Born in 1916, Jean was 23 when the war began. She had grown up acutely aware of the horrors of the Great War and was politicised from an early age. She trained and worked as a journalist, but gave up her job when she became pregnant and left London. She lost this child but later gave birth to a son. On returning to London, she went back to journalism and became an active member of the Communist Party, while caring single-handedly for her son. She met and fell in love with Monte, her second husband, an airman who in 1943 was shot down over Holland. Badly wounded, he was captured by the Germans and after 15 months as a POW, was repatriated on a prisoners' exchange scheme in 1944.

Born in 1926, Bernard was almost 12 at the start of the war, when he was evacuated with two brothers to the Essex countryside. They returned to London at Easter 1940, after their parents decided that they wanted their sons with them. He remembers: the misery of the shelters, the acrid smells that filled the city after air raids, but also the delight he and his friends derived from books, music, paintings, ideas. He was called up in January 1945, aged 18, and at the end of the war was posted to Karachi, eventually to join a British/Indian team overseeing the security of that city: it was an enthralling, mind-opening experience. For years he felt guilt at not having been old enough to fight in the war.

Born in 1914, Basil spent much of 1938 and 39 as a journalist in the Balkans. At the start of the war, Basil was immediately recruited by the intelligence services and was sent to Belgrade and Hungary to produce British propaganda for the local population. When Germany invaded, Basil escaped to the south, where he was captured by the Italians. Uncertain what to do, they put him and others on a locked train and sent them to Spain, then on to Portugal and ultimately to Gibraltar and home. He was immediately sent back to Istanbul as a spy and then moved to the Balkans to support the partisan war in Yugoslavia. After that, he was transferred to Italy, where he continued to lead Italian partisan resistance to the Germans until the end of the war.

Born in 1919, Geoffrey was 20 when the war began, and studying at Oxford University. He joined the Royal Artillery immediately and had various postings around Britain. His regiment was sent via Canada, to the Far East and arrived in Singapore at the end of January 42, only weeks before the British forces capitulated to the Japanese. He lived for three and a half years in Japanese PoW camps along the so-called Railway of Death from Siam (Thailand) to Burma. He remembers the suffering and the beatings and the meagre rations, but also the resilience and resourcefulness. He describes his feelings at being welcomed home by tumultuous crowds at Southampton.

Born in 1918, Eunice was 20 when the war began and was working at Jolly's, a grand department store in Bath. In 1940 she married Sydney and became a farmer's wife. She recalls the hardships - long hours, hard labour, no electricity - and describes in detail the routine farm work and domestic work - digging vegetables, cooking and preserving, making butter, doing laundry. But there was always plenty to eat and she remembers it as a happy time. Land girls came to work on the farm, and later Italian prisoners. But the war seemed remote.

Born in 1916, the son of a farmer, Sidney married in 1940 and started working his own farm. Ambitious and hard-working, he became involved in WarAg which was responsible for encouraging and helping farmers to grow as much food as possible. He remembers the farming routine and the kinds of produce they made. And recalls the rationing system, the way in which food production and distribution was centrally controlled. Farm labour often came from Prisoner of War camps: he remembers the Italians as well as a "red Indian". The war left them largely unscathed and, as they grew or caught their own food, were unaffected by the stringent rationing.

Born in 1924, Daphne was living in the East End of London, where her father worked as a docker. She left school at 14 and was working in a factory making Teddy Bears. When the war began they started making soldiers' haversacks instead. On a holiday in Somerset she met her future husband, but returned to Dagenham to work in an aircraft components factory. She got engaged by letter to George (who was fighting in the desert), they bought their own rings, and it was another three years and nine months before they saw each other.

Born 1920, Dolly was nineteen when the war began. She worked as a machinist making soldiers uniforms, living in the East End of London with her mother and sister. The bombing raids were particularly bad, and it was not long before they were "blasted out" of their house. Terrified by the bombs, she decided to join up, and spent the remainder of the war serving in soldiers' canteens in the various camps on the south coast of England. She remembers the different nationalities coming through - Polish, French, Canadian.