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From Dolly Bushby
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At the age of 21 years my eyes were opened to the world, but then I had been a grown up from the age of fourteen, that was the way in my day, we did not have the luxury of a teenage:

I was working as a telephonist in London:

On the Saturday, 9th September, the first of the big raids, which heralded the start of the ‘Battle of Britain’ began. I was on duty that afternoon at the Advance Telephone Exchange at Eric Street, the Bow, E3. There were two other telephonists working with me, we were all in our early twenties. I was supervisor in charge, being the one with the longest service. To our horror the air aid warning came through ‘Red’ — which we knew from our training meant ‘coming to your area now’ — we had experienced warnings before but they had never reached the Red Alert stage. We put on our specially converted gas masks, which we thought was the best thing to do, then contacted all the emergency services as directed on our Charts.

The raid started in earnest, but we stayed at our switchboards on the top floor. The surrounding buildings were on fire from the incendiary bombs, which came just before the actual big bombs. We were surrounded by glass windows and could see the fires everywhere and burning debris blowing around, there were loud blasts as the bombs exploded, smoke and fire filled the sky.

We were constantly receiving calls for hospitals or police help and passing the calls on to the respective services. The police station a short distance away was hit and the Bow railway bridge was demolished, as dusk came and turned into night the views of the fires were terrifyingly ore inspiring.

Messages were coming in from other exchanges and I heard worrying news about heavy bombing in East Ham, my sister who was just sixteen year old at the time was a trainee sales lady in one of the shops in that area. When the bombing started hitting East Ham the people had naturally gone down to the cellars, which had been prepared as air raid shelters. Many had then been drowned, trapped in these cellars below the shops as the water mains had been hit. This was sickening news.

As the raid subsided some of the night staff finally got through to work and my colleagues and I were relieved of duty and were able to get a few hours sleep in the shelter at the exchange. The next morning back at the switch-board on the top floor it was heart breaking to look out and see groups of bedraggled parents and children, clutching the few belongings they had saved, if any, pets, birds in cages, in tow, all struggling along the streets to the emergency services. Most had lost everything.

I was now told to go off duty and as there was no transport had to walk home to Dagenham, via Bow Road, Ilford and Barking. I cannot remember how long it took to walk; the journey was horrendous passing so many bombed places.

When I finally reached home my Mother and Father were both there and told me that my sister was thankfully safe.

My Mother then told that she had gone to the shops and the Fried Fish shop man had told her he could not fry his fish as he had no gas or electricity. So she had kindly bought him it from him, saying not to worry she would cook it at home. On arriving home she realised how daft she had been, as she had no cooking facilities either. My Father came to the rescue by building a square block of bricks in the garden with his blow torch in the centre and the fish was successfully fried — years before it was common place to have a barbecue in your garden! The fish tasted delicious, a moment of normality in my much changed world.

I had so many more similar duties during air raids. I was on duty when the first flying bomb V1 came overhead, landing nearby in Grove Road and remember the weird feeling when one of the shocked engineers came to tell us that there had been no pilot in the plane. Our first experience of the ‘pilot-less plane’.

Another memory was the strange, jangling sound of the bombs that came hanging on chains, looking like suspended dustbins; ready to explode wherever they landed. We soon learnt to fear those.

Dolly Bushby

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