"I've been in Cinderford Guides ever since..."

Sheila Llewellyn’s lifelong commitment to guiding began with camping in her best friend’s garden and continued for the rest of her life. Here she describes how the two of them first joined The Guides.

"My pigtails in a little paper bag..."

Born in Lydney Hospital in 1939, ​Pam Box grew up in Pillowell. When to her mother's surprise she passed for the grammar school, Pam remembered a promise that had been made. 

"Who loves the Fuhrer?"

As a child in pre-war Germany under the National Socialists ​Margaret Phelps, later to move to Worral Hill, recalls on her first day the teacher asking the class: ‘Wehr liebt sein fuhrer?’ (who loves the Fuhrer?) She was too young to know but found herself cruelly treated.

"It was wild..."

Nigel Isaac and another child from a rural area were sent to Barton Road Technical School in Gloucester. Being seen as different to the city boys he was immediately met with bullying there. Here he describes what happened in his first few days at school, and what his father taught him in order to deal with it.  

"We used to call it the 'Cowshed'..."

Pat Harper describes going swimming with her school and changing in the ‘Cowshed’, at the Bathurst Pool in Lydney. She compares her experience with the heated pool at Cheltenham Gentleman’s College where, as a teenage employee, she was allowed to swim.

"They'd never heard of Broadwell..."

Glenda Griffiths was coming to the end of her formal education in the Forest and had to complete her final years schooling in Gloucester. Her uniform, accent and elevation to prefect made her unpopular and she was taunted by the cry: ‘Who killed the bears?’