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Young Judie Gwynne (nee Waterman) was just nine years old when WWII broke out in 1939, and over the course of the next three years her home town of Bude was little touched by the war.
We had evacuees, she wrote, quite a few of the girls at school were refugees including a foreign ambassador's daughters for a short time. There had been an aerial dog fight above Crooklets beach one summer's day as the Children's Special Service Mission conducted a Sunday service from a pulpit made of sand, and on another occasion a plane had come down near the outdoor swimming pool nearby.
Spread out as these events were over the war period we were quite unprepared for what was to come.
(Judie's education carried on as normal, well, for a while at least.)
Our school was housed at the end of a row of terrace houses adjacent to which was a quite large triangular piece of wasteland. All the pupils used to cross this scrubby ground daily to make short cuts to our various roads home. You can imagine our surprise when 'our' piece of land was overnight, so it seemed, taken over by the American Army as a Field Kitchen.
I do not remember any of us talking to the American soldiers; I expect we would not have dared with the eagle eye of our head mistress seemingly everywhere; we were supposed to be young ladies. Even if we went to the cinema, a forbidden leisure activity in term time, our head mistress would know immediately and we would be summoned to her study to explain our fall from grace. To be fair to her I was able to realise later in my adult years that the risk of spreading coughs and colds from our attendance in public places was most probably the incentive for this dictum rather that attention to our morals.
Of course there were wolf whistles, a new phenomena to us, together with jocular remarks, but we stuck our noses in the air and walked past on our daily journey to and from school. Our short cut through the wasteland now denied us we had to walk daily the gauntlet along the long side of the Field Kitchen.
We did meet some of the officers socially, one was billeted in the house where our family temporarily lived sharing a large farmhouse with an old lady. I do not remember if this particular American officer was actually billeted on the adjoining half of the farmhouse, or if he was a friend of the old lady's son, and perhaps spent some of his leave in the peaceful rural part of Cornwall. My youngest sister often went riding on her pony in the lanes around the farm and this officer joined her for some of her rides.
To my parents' astonishment the young American came to see them expressing his wish to marry their daughter, no doubt she looked charming with her long corkscrew ringlets combined with her fearless management of her pony and other horses, we thought her another 'Diana'.
Our parents, after getting over their astonishment, naturally refused to even consider the matter, pointing out that she was still a child at school.
From that time, after his return to America at the end of the war, he wrote to them every Christmas expressing his wish to marry her. These letters were concealed from my sister as she grew up and she finally only learned of this situation when she had become a grandmother.
Sadly, the soldier wrote very many years later to say he had not found anyone to fill her place but had finally decided to marry and have the family he had wished for. He never wrote to them again.
How different my sister's life might have been, I think she regretted that the choice had never been given to her. I still retain that memory of an attractive and charming man.
Our only cinema was situated at the top end of the town and when a popular film arrived it became very difficult indeed for the local people to get in, particularly in the cheaper seats. I can remember queuing at our end of the town, for about a quarter of a mile, in order to reach the top eventually and maybe, if we were lucky, get in before the last seat was sold. I do not think the cinema's owners had so frequently filled the seats night after night.
The Texans, as I believe the soldiers were, were here at a very unusual event when two 'Liberty' ships were sunk out to sea and the cargoes arrived all along our coast covered in oil. This oil had preserved the contents of each carton or bale perfectly.
One summer day, we all started off to school as usual, threading our way down the very familiar narrow sandy path which ran alongside the end houses and the wire mesh fence on the other side of the path. It seemed very quiet and to our astonishment we saw only an empty space, just some large drums containing, so we discovered, 'Dripping'.
No one who has not been through a wartime experience can remember the glories of hot dripping toast spread thinly on top with Bovril, eaten round the log fire on a cold winter's night.
As growing children we were at times a little hungry, and fats of any kind were in very short supply indeed. However, we were brought up nicely, and stealing this apparently abandoned food was not an option (or so I thought).
To my chagrin the next day the drums were quite empty, and I found to my annoyance my more enterprising school friends had scooped the fat up with jam jars and cups, in fact anything they could find, to take large quantities of the precious home.
Unknown to us the entire American Army billeted in our area and the surrounding villages had quietly stolen away overnight - it was the dawn of 'D' Day.
The preparations for this had been taking place under our eyes on the nearby beaches and cliffs, we had become used to seeing the soldiers scaling the cliffs above the beaches as we played nearby, little guessing they were not just going through the motions of training but were in active preparation for the landings on the Normandy beaches.
I expect the fact that the beaches were not sealed off to the local population, and normal activities such as paddling in pools, walking the dog must have been the perfect camouflage. Little did we know that after the war, people would be paying to come on courses to learn to abseil down the cliffs on to those identical beaches, probably entirely unaware of their part in a historical event.
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