大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War web site by Karen Elmes at the Building Exploratory on behalf of Gladys Hodges and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Gladys grew up in an orphanage at Clacton-on-Sea. She was 12 years old when she and the 100 other girls were evacuated to Gloucestershire. The girls were split up and Gladys went to stay with a couple who couldn鈥檛 have children. They wanted to adopt her but she said no as she had a father and didn鈥檛 want to lose him.

A man called John Grooms was in charge of the girls, he decided to bring all them together again to live in a big house in Shropshire. Gladys stayed there until she was 14. She then went to work at John Grooms Crippleage in Edgware. The John Grooms Crippleage was a home for disabled women where the inmates made artificial flowers to help with their keep. Gladys looked after an elderly lady, helped with the cleaning and also assisted the women into the shelters during air raids.

When she was fifteen Gladys moved in with her grandmother in Tottenham, when the doodlebugs started dropping:

鈥淚t was terrible, we had to all go into the shelter but you could hear them coming and going quiet and dropping, it was very frightening.鈥�

Whilst living in Tottenham Gladys went to work as an experienced shirt presser at a laundry in Haringey where they cleaned army, navy and air force uniforms. The laundry suffered a direct hit from a bomb, killing two of her colleagues. She remembers being scared when she came out of the shelter and seeing that familiar buildings had been completely destroyed by the bombing.

This story was recorded by the Building Exploratory as part of a World War Two reminiscence project called Memory Blitz. To find out more please go to ^{About links}

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