Children look back to World War II

Both junior and senior students at Our Lady of Sion, Worthing, took part in a week-long Peace Festival, which gave them the opportunity to create posters, poems and artwork to celebrate the end of the war.

Their work was used as a backdrop for the VE Day Museum in the school's chapel.

Judy Chambers, of the school, said: "We asked the families of all our pupils if any of their relatives had wartime artefacts or memories they could let us have for our museum and we had a wonderful response.

"We had a huge range of items, ranging from ration books, original wartime government information pamphlets, gas masks and army uniform items to service medals '” including an OBE and German Iron Cross."

The school had many responses to its request for wartime memories. These will form a permanent addition to the school library for use by pupils studying wartime history.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was a collection of love-letters, exchanged over the whole course of the war, between a woman called Ivy and her sweetheart (later her husband) Bill, who was a serving soldier.

A Wartime Concert and Show, "Imagine", was staged on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday evening.

To link the Peace Festival to current world events, the whole school had been raising money for UNICEF over the last term. So far, they have raised almost 7,000.

Alex Cowley, 11, who is in Year 7, said: "I really enjoyed taking part in the show; I learned a lot about what it was like to be an evacuee, and how frightening it must have been."