大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education鈥檚 reminiscence team on behalf of Dora Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

At the start of the war I had just had a baby and all the pleasure of being a Mum was taken away by the worry of the war. The war started on a Sunday, and the siren went that same day. I was really worried. After that I didn鈥檛 see anything of the neighbours, a young couple, so I went to see where they were. I found them sitting in the hall with their masks on, hugging each other.

When my son was two we got bombed out. The German hedge-hopped. I was in the garden and could hear a plane approaching. Suddenly it came over right close and when I saw it I shouted to my husband 鈥淚t鈥檚 a German plane鈥�. He ran out and pulled me to the ground. I could see the pilot as plain as could be. He had a brown leather helmet. The houses two doors up got a direct hit and we lost our kitchen and bathroom, so we couldn鈥檛 live there anymore. The RAF had taken over a local airfield and that鈥檚 why the German attacked the area. He hit a hangar at the airfield too and all brown smoke went up. My neighbours were buried up to their heads in rubble. My husband went to help dig them out until help arrived, and they were eventually rescued.

I tried to pack some things up, but a man came and told me not to because there was an unexploded bomb at the end of the garden. So I had to go off straight away. We went to my sister鈥檚 house, which was empty at the time. Later we got bombed out of there too and went to live with my other sister. Then she had incendiaries dropped all over her house and after that we were invited to live with some friends in Brook in the country.

In the meantime my husband had been sent to Oxford to work. He wasn鈥檛 in the army because he worked in the theatre business and was exempt from military service because of his morale-boosting role for people in Britain.

One day my brother came to see me. His wife had been pregnant and he had a newborn baby with him. I asked him how Edith his wife was, but she had died in childbirth and he had brought the baby for me to look after. My son Colin was three years old at the time. It was Colin who made the decision to keep Michael as he said he wanted a brother.

The Doodlebugs used to come over and you could see a flare coming out the back of them. I couldn鈥檛 bear being in the shelter when they were coming over, so my sister stopped there with the children while I went outside.

One day, when the bombing was bad in Norwich, my husband came indoors after a raid and told me not to go down the garden. But I was nosey, so I did go. I saw my neighbours dead in their upturned shelter. It was a terrible shock because I had been close to them

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