“IF the Germans come tomorrow, what shall we do?”…"We shall go out into the streets and die with dignity.”

This is one of the wartime conversations between Prudence Bebb’s parents - as they feared imminent invasion in 1940 - which are recounted in a new book written by the retired teacher from York to mark VE Day 75.

Prudence, 81, of Poppleton, tells in ‘A Wartime Child’ how she and her mother Elsie followed her father Douglas, an army padre, as he was posted to military bases across the country during the war.

She tells how he was playing chess with the colonel one day in the officers’ mess at a base in Essex when a bomb landed just outside, creating a huge crater. She writes: “Mummy threw herself protectively over me. She knew that the crash was from near to where Daddy was. She shook with fear and I said: "Mummy, are you cold? You’re shivering."

“A large crater had just appeared by the window outside the officer’s mess... The colonel looked up to remark: ‘I say, Padre, that fellow’s made a noise with his boots.’ And they carried on playing chess.”

She says the next day she found a ‘sparkly object’ on the ground which was part of a new plane which had been shot down. It was taken to the Air Ministry to be pieced together with other parts, to learn how the plane had been made.

Prudence tells how on another occasion, her Auntie Minnie refused to leave her artist’s studio during an air raid, saying: “I’m not afraid of the Germans," at which point a policeman scooped her up and ran downstairs with her. “Was she grateful? Not a bit, she was furious.”

Prudence said she originally wrote the book for an intended VE Day 75 exhibition in the church near the nursing home where she lives in Shipton by Beningbrough, which couldn’t go ahead because of the pandemic.