'We lived through the air raids. That's why Christmas is so special': A Sunderland couple's amazing story

Robert Edward Berston and his wife Sylvia will be surrounded by adoring relatives for a huge festive get-together.

They lived through the air raids

But it could have been so different.

Both of them lived through the horrors of the Second World War and both were children who survived traumatic air raids in different parts of Sunderland.

Sylvia found the Wearside blitz so traumatic that she has suffered from a fear of thunderstorms ever since.

The two 89-year-olds told how they got through it all by singing in the shelters.

Doing The Lambeth Walk

They even treated the Sunderland Echo reporting team to a wonderful rendition of Doing The Lambeth Walk - the song which kept their spirits up as the bombs fell.

Bob, who grew up in the Garths, relived childhood Christmas memories.

He told us his dad bought him a brand new pair of leather boots from the money he won in a raffle.

‘I kept them under the kitchen table. There were times when I used to get up during the night to smell the leather.”

‘You were lucky if you got a bag of fruit for Christmas’

‘Christmas was a joyful thing. Toys and that sort of thing were sparse then. You were lucky if you got a bag of fruit.”

Bob told how his dad often worked away in the Peterborough area but always sent toys home for his children at Christmas - from dolls for the girls to an accordion or cricket bat for the boys.

But it wasn’t the presents which stuck in his mind as a Christmas highlight from those days.

‘I was a nervous wreck when the siren went off’

“Singing round the fire was mostly what happened. The atmosphere was great and I loved it.

It was a rare highlight in an era when one German incendiary bomb had landed feet from his family home in Burleigh Garth.

It showered the house with his glass including all over his baby sister’s cot - yet she slept through it.

‘There were reasons to be thankful’

Sylvia came from Plains Farm. She said she ‘hated’ the days when the bombs fell.

“It was awful. We had to get from upstairs to downstairs and into the shelter, and the shelter was not that big.

“It was in the back yard and you had to get in to there in case any bombs dropped. I hated it.

“If I heard a siren, I was a nervous wreck. It was really frightening. The bombs were horrible.”

But Sylvia had one huge reason to be thankful. It was the best present of all.

All of her family survived the war and all came back home from serving their country in one piece.

Next time: The massive celebrations which broke out across Sunderland when war ended.