Carmen Cid was just eight when in 1937 she boarded a ship with 4,000 other children bound for Britain to escape the Spanish Civil War. She was among those who never returned home.
"We thought we were going on holiday," the now 97-year-old told AFP.
Travelling with her sister Edurne, 11, and her brother Jose Luis, 10, they left their home in Bilbao, in Spain's northern Basque region, onboard the SS Habana for Southampton, England.
"My mother took us to the boat and we never knew anything else," recalled Cid, speaking at her home in Carlisle, northwest England, where she lives with her son, Luis Eckersley, 66, and daughter-in-law.
"We were told that we would return in three months' time when the armies of Franco had been thrown back from a safe distance from Bilbao," she said, referring to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
