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Sylvia Pizer

"(In) 1939 I was 11, and the war came and life was turned upside down. And erm my sister and myself and my brother were sent away from the school on a train. Where we were going we didn’t know, nobody knew. But it ended up 9 miles inland from Brighton called Hurstpierpoint and everyone stood in the hall waiting for somebody to say I’ll have you."
 

"(My parents) were both immigrants from, one from Poland and the other from Romania, and they worked together in a workshop in the East End, somewhere along Commercial Road. Erm, machining men’s trousers. Ladies trousers weren’t hardly heard of then. Men’s trousers they cheaper, what are they called, erm shipping work which used to go out to God knows where. Erm, they met there and they were both working, both 14 and I think they must have got married when they were 19, or something like that. I can’t remember if my father was a little bit older, perhaps he was, I can’t remember,  But anyway, they were two of a kind and they got married, I think in 1924"

"This other family were erm, were better class really I found out. My sister’s lodgings were from a farm labourer in a council house. My lodgings were up from that and they treated me absolutely like a treasure, you know, cos they had no children and they loved having me and it was wonderful. I went to school, my school Raines took a house just outside the village or on the outskirts of the village of Hurstpierpoint... Hurstpierpoint 9 miles from Brighton and this Elizabethan house became my school. Wonderful time. Wonderful, going to school through bluebell woods and buttercups, yeah, a really lovely time we had And that lasted for about 6 months"

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