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 Vera Guest and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I lived in Chislehurst on the outskirts of London during the war. We lived around the area where the enemy planes would often dump their bombs on the way home, if they hadn鈥檛 dropped them on central London.

A couple of years into the war, I was in Pett鈥檚 Wood with my fianc茅 and we could see all these planes coming up the Thames and swooping over us. All of a sudden one came right up to the trees and we thought we were going to be hit, but all I could think of was that my Nylon stockings would be ruined!

I got married during the war, in 1942, and had to do a lot of saving and borrowing of coupons to get all I needed, although we did of course get some extra coupons for the extras we needed. We made our own wedding cake. I had my first baby in 1944. Expectant mothers were given two eggs a week. Other than that it was powdered egg and we had it scrambled.

My husband worked for the Ministry of Defence, but wasn鈥檛 in the Forces because he failed the medical. I worked in the War Office. You had to do your bit whether you wanted to or not. I had to do fire watching for our office in Whitehall two nights a week. The Ministry of Fisheries was opposite, and got a direct hit.

You couldn鈥檛 do anything about the Doodlebugs, and if you heard their engines stop then you just had to look out. One hit the garage to our house, and set it on fire. We were lucky to escape as we were asleep in bed at the time, because we never used to get up in the raids. The windows of the bedroom blew in and glass came flying in all over the bed, and scratched us. It was a miracle that we escaped without greater injury.

My brother was eight when the war started, and was evacuated to Hunstanton. He hated it. He was too young to be away from his home and family, staying with strangers. He came back to Chislehurst when things quietened down, but then had to be evacuated again.

Woolworth鈥檚 in Deptford was hit by a V2. We knew something terrible had happened that day, although we didn鈥檛 hear any screaming or shouting.

During the war we didn鈥檛 have a lot of sugar or butter, and I think that was healthier than we are now. My Dad was a butcher, and I must admit, we sometimes got a few extra sausages on the quiet. We used to 鈥淒ig for Victory鈥� 鈥� we grew lots of potatoes, onions and carrots.

I made the children鈥檚 clothes from cut-down adults clothing. A group of us used to get together each week to knit mittens and socks for the Home Guard. There were about six of us got together, but we stopped doing it so often when the bombing got so bad that it didn鈥檛 feel safe to venture out.

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