大象传媒

This story was added to the website by a CSV volunteer on behalf of Joyce Caskey, who has given her permission for her story to appear on the site, and understands the terms and conditions of the website.

My earliest memory of the war was the day that war was declared, I was 7 years old, my Sister was 9 years old. It was a nice sunny day in September, 1939. My Sister and I with some other children who lived in the same road in the east end of London this being one road behind Victoria Dock Road. Some funnily dressed men were shouting out that war had been declared on Germany. We were terrified and all the children were screaming, and they didn鈥檛 know what was happening, that little did we know that the worst was yet to come.

It was the first Saturday of the blitz and living close to the Victoria and Albert docks the area took a hammering, the raids lasted all day and night. The sky was ablaze with fire and the road was so close to the docks and our house was bombed that night. We had no place to go and eventually we were put into a local school it was called Agate Street School. I would have thought that 200 people were in the school that night. We were told that coaches would arrive in a couple of hours to take us elsewhere but they did not arrive that night.

We were all given mattresses to put down on the floor to lay on and to try to get some sleep with our next door neighbours one of the family being my Sisters in laws and two teenage children. My Father was at work in the docks who eventually found where we were. People were running around looking for their family and friends, my Mother, my Sister and myself lay down on the mattresses to try to get some rest, my Mother was feeling very unwell, it was not possible to sleep as the noise of the bombing was horrendous.

My Father insisted that we leave the school to find another shelter. There was nowhere, only the brick shelter that had been built in the playground for the school children. We managed just about to get in, we were packed like sardines, but we must think ourselves lucky as the school received a direct hit by a land mine, My Sisters in Laws were killed and their bodies were never found. That night over one hundred people were killed, we were lucky or call it fate.

The coaches did arrive at dawn and they got us out of the shelter that was badly damaged, it was a cold September dawn. They gave us blankets to put around us as we lined the pavements waiting. In that era when you had a new doll it always came in a plain cardboard box but it was bodies that they were bringing out. We wondered where so many boxes of dolls came from, the coaches arrived.

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