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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Janine John of the Cumbria volunteers on behalf of Lilian and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was just nineteen when the war started, the youngest child and the only girl. All my brothers were called up; two of them were in the army, one in the air force and one in the fire brigade. They wouldn’t let you go away if you were in the fire brigade. The day that war was announced, I was in the house with my mother and father. We were living in London. My mother just said, ‘Grab her quick’. It was the first time I had ever fainted.

From then on we just didn’t know what to expect or when. Only the day of the announcement the sirens went off, but it turned out to be a false alarm. The noise of the sirens was awful, dreadful. We lived in a little Mews cottage, on the top floor of a small building situated behind a row of large houses. When the sirens sounded, for safety, we left the houses and went to the nearby air raid shelter. It had to be absolute darkness. On returning to the house one night we could see barely anything by the tiniest little flame but as my father went to force the door to open it, we realised he didn’t have to because it was hanging only by one hinge.

It was only the next morning that we could see the damage that had been done to our house and those around it. Landmines had floated down on the area which was quite unusual as these were not often used. We were all in the kitchen and I remember asking what the tiny scratching noise was that I could hear at the front door. What we found when we opened the door still amazes me now as the Air Wardens had posted a notice to the front of the house declaring it unsafe and not to be entered, however nobody had actually checked to see if anyone was in it at that moment — we were all still there! After that we had to move to a ground floor flat in Camden Town.

At the start of the war I had been working in the clothing industry and was at Great Portland Street, in the manufacturing of blast proof covers for helmets, a form of khaki and sponge ear protection, to be worn when firing guns. It was a large factory and I worked on the fourth floor. One day the girls and I were having a break and a natter in the courtyard, just to the side of the building when it was hit by bombs that failed to explode. I had seen them coming down towards the site and they had given me a terrible turn. Of course, the building was emptied and we were taken to the nearest air raid shelter. Both my mother and father had seen the bombs drop in the area of the factory and they didn’t know where I was — nor was there any way of letting them know. When it was all over and it was time to go home there were no buses. At those times a bus was few and far between, or at least they were very unreliable. We were all given a ride home by a driver who had pulled over - as people often would - and asked if we needed a lift on his way; this occasion was slightly unusual in that the driver’s mode of transport was a hearse!

Later in the war it was made compulsory that I must work in a factory which was built on a farm. I used to swing a 10lb mallet into the side of the great guns. Where the inside of the gun had been hollowed out, we used the hammer to check for faults. Once I was aware of a young man stood at the opposite corner of the factory watching us. When I enquired what he looking at he replied that he had never seen women working in a factory in this way before.

Of course while there was such a lot of change and uncertainty at home, there was also the worry of my brothers abroad. One of them was injured and we were told that he was in hospital — we were not told what for though. It was the not knowing that was such a worry, especially as it turned out that it was not the war that did it. Whilst off duty, he had been enjoying drinks in one of the local bars in Italy when two men set upon him and broke his jaw in three places — it was a case of mistaken identity but left him in a terrible state in hospital.

At one point we were also extremely worried about my eldest brother. His wife would come round to the house because when soldiers came back into the country they could send a stamped postcard to let us know they were safe. For a while there was nothing. Eventually she came round to tell us it had arrived. We didn’t know where he was or when we would see him, but we knew he was in the country and that was all that mattered.

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