大象传媒

In 1941 when my husband, Claude, was serving in South Africa, I was living with my mother, father, younger sister Betty and my two children, Nina, two and half years old and, Gillian, who was still a baby. We were sharing a house in Field Terrace, Ramsey in Cambridgeshire.
It was a Saturday night when we had our very lucky escape. When we first started hearing air-raid sirens, we would always get up and dressed, and usually hide in the pantry under the stairs, but as time went by, we grew used to hearing them, so on this particular night, we stayed in bed.
I was sharing a bed with my sister, Betty. Gillian was in her cot and my other daughter, Nina, was in her bed. We were all sound asleep when the bomb exploded and I don鈥檛 remember hearing a thing.
The first thing I do remember hearing was my mother, running up the stairs to our bedroom, calling 鈥淢y babies鈥y babies.鈥� Betty and I awoke to find that the bedroom window had blown in, covering Gillian in broken glass. The fireplace had collapsed into the room and a large wooden support beam had crashed through the ceiling but had stopped before it had fallen on us and crushed us. We were amazingly lucky. Gillian鈥檚 nappy was full of broken glass but apart from a couple of small cuts, she was miraculously unharmed. As for myself, Betty and Nina we were shaken but unscathed. With hindsight, I think the blast had stunned us all. But I also think it was fortunate that we had not woken and tried to escape, because if we had been out of bed, I think we would have been seriously injured by flying glass and masonry. As for the beam 鈥� when my father, who was an air raid warden, returned with another warden, my father was warned not to go into the room because it was too dangerous and the beam was very unstable. I don鈥檛 know what stopped this great beam from falling in and crushing all of us, but I do know we were all very lucky to be alive.
Three generations of my family were in the house that night. My aunt, who was downstairs at the time, would have been seriously injured had she gone to her bedroom sooner, as her bed was directly beneath the window, which was blown in.
We left the house, went to the safety of the nearby undertaker鈥檚 house, then to the police station where my mother鈥檚 cousin was the Police Inspector. We stayed there until morning when we got a taxi to a house in Gamlingay, where we stayed for a few weeks, until we were offered another house on Upwood Road, where we stayed until the end of the war.
The rumour was, that German bombers followed a bus from Peterborough and dropped the bombs because they thought they had found Upwood aerodrome, which was just down the road.

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