There’s a back garden in Sutton Bridge that has some hidden away, wartime memories – three air raid shelters built for the old infants’ school.
Leslie Garner has lived in Wharf Street with his wife, Laura, since the early 1970s.
They built their house on the site of the old school and the playground wall still stands as the perimeter to their back garden.
Go further back through a gateway and you’ll find a green space with the reinforced concrete air raid shelters, each big enough to take 30 people.
The Garners have allowed the greenery surrounding the above-ground shelters to grow up so they blend into the scenery.
Leslie said: “It’s become quite derelict, really. I am rather glad because we think it’s a haven for the birds.”
Inside, the shelters are as dry and in as good structural order as they were in the wartime years – but these days they are used to store bits and pieces like wheelbarrows rather than frightened children sheltering from bombs.
Leslie (90) was in the RAF during the war, spending some of the time overseas, but knows the shelters were used by the children and says adults used to sleep there are night too during air raids.
The Garner family provided its fair share of pupils to the school – Leslie attended with his sister and brother, their father went there and so did their grandfather when the school was new.
Leslie said originally there was a boys’ school in Wharf Street and a girls’ school in nearby Church Street.
Some pieces of the old school’s equipment were donated to a Lincolnshire museum by the Garners after they bought the plot for their new home.
Leslie was born in Sutton Bridge and has stayed there all of his life, apart from the war years.
He met his Grimsby-born wife when they were both learning to fly at an aero club in Lincoln and at one time they owned two planes.
Leslie’s father, Sidney, started a very successful corn and agricultural merchants – and Leslie and his elder brother David (91), who now lives in Liverpool, became directors.
A nearby block of flats is known as Garner’s Wharf in tribute to the now closed family business.