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young. It was just a normal day.’ They had not gone far when they pulled up at the roadside to buy a drink from a corner shop. By chance, the lady behind the counter called them over to listen to the radio. There they heard the words that would mean so much to their generation, as Neville Chamberlain told the nation: ‘This country is at war with Germany.’ This was followed by the dejected voice of the shop-owner: ‘Oh no, not again.’ Her dejection was not shared by the two youngsters, who cycled on merrily calling out to passers-by: ‘War’s declared! War’s declared!’
    Within minutes of the declaration, the air raid sirens sounded for the first time. It was a false alarm that sent most of London scurrying around looking for their gas masks before running off to the shelters. Indeed, pre-war Air Ministry estimates concluded that London would be hit by 100 tons of bombs on the first day of war. Blithely, the two teenagers continued on their way to St Albans, unconcerned by the potential realities of war. The reality felt by the older generation was not revealed until the boys returned home later that day, with Peter Richards being asked by his mother: ‘Why didn’t you come home earlier?’ In the Cotter household it was similar: ‘My father was in a bit of a funk. They’d had the air raid alarm, which we hadn’t heard. He had got my mother, my sister and my brother ready to go to the air raid shelter and I wasn’t there.’
    And so the first day of the war came to an end and Peter Richards noted:

    On that day, apart from concerns over military service, a hundred & one questions quickly surfaced. Could London survive the expected air raids, would poison gas be used and how long would the conflict last? Would we get enough to eat? Such questions were answered with the agreed, ‘we will have to wait and see!’. As night fell, people prepared for bed in a sober mood. The day seemed to have changed everything. In the small hours of the morning the air raid sirens wailed again, but it was another false alarm. Unknown to us the ‘Phoney War’ had begun.
    The whole country experienced the outbreak of war on an individual level. The wide-ranging emotional impact of war differed from person to person, but fell into a number of general themes. The youngest children had no understanding of what it meant. For older children, buoyed by the natural exuberance of youth, the threat of war was easier to ignore, meaning many of the nation’s teenagers were unmoved. They had a life to live. Whether still in education or out taking their steps into the world of work, they inhabited a world they wanted to enjoy. For the boys, there were girls to chase, sports and games to throw themselves into and a world to explore. For the girls, there were boys to impress, clothes to buy, make-up to experiment with and a similar world to explore. For teenage newspaper vendors, the first change to their routine was that Sunday newspapers rushed out special editions and they had to head out on to the streets to sell the papers to a concerned public.
    For twelve-year-old Sylvia Bowman war seemed almost unintelligible: ‘I didn’t really understand what it meant. I knew it was a fight between countries for whatever reason, and they were short lived, maybe just a few weeks. The whole concept was too much for a youngster like me.’ However, the situation became clearer when her father announced he was glad he had five daughters since women did not have to go to war. In Hainault, five-year-old Colin Furk was also too young to understand what was going on, but realized something had upset his grandmother, asking her: “‘What have you done wrong?” She said, “I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s somebody else.”’
    Eight-year-old Sylvia Bradbrook was in a cake shop with her father when the news was broadcast. He grabbed her hand, barked ‘Quick!’ and they ran back to their house. As they ran, the sirens sounded. Shehad no idea