大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Graham Lewis for Three Counties Action on behalf of Mrs Pat Paul and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Paul fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

My father married and moved to Newcastle. I then lived in Mitcham in Surrey. I was 17 in 1939. During the war I worked at a firm of printers doing work for the Ministry of Information and went into London every day by bus. I remember having free tickets for the ballet.

We printed leaflets for dropping into Europe, among other things. General De Gaulle often came into the printing offices, presumably to give us texts and to check the proofs and printing.

I met my husband at the technical college. We married in February 1943 and he went to Rhodesia and South Africa where he was a maintenance engineer working on aircraft. For a while before this, I lived with him in Dundee where I worked in a firm making ammunition. My wages were 拢1 and 5 shillings a week. My husband spent his embarkation leave there.

I then moved back to Mitcham. I was terrified by the blitz. I regularly slept under the stairs. An incendiary bomb fell into the bathroom ceiling.

I remember an occasion when we heard a buzz bomb (V1 rocket) coming over. I was with my baby in a pram standing in the street outside a dairy. I just grabbed the baby and ran. I came back to find shattered glass all over the pram. I had a nervous breakdown following this incident and could not use my legs for a month. The blitz in the Elephant and Castle area was terrible.

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