"The day war broke out"
Although eight years old at the time I clearly remember my mother and her parents listening to the announcement on the radio. I had previously constructed an air raid shelter for my lead soldiers in the back garden and the first thing I did was to put them under cover.
We lived in Canterbury,( the English one), and during the first year of the war we had to leave school whenever the siren sounded and walk over a bridge across the river to the shelter where we remained until the all clear sounded. During 1940 the siren often sounded early in the morning and the alert often lasted all day. The pupils could only leave during an alert if they were collected by a parent, so if a parent was working it could be late in the evening before you were allowed to leave.