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Entered on behalf of Jean Gamble

It started fairly early in the evening. All I know is that we had hours with an unholy pounding. It really was absolutely frightening. An air raid warden came in and started screaming that my mother had left a light on upstairs in the end bedroom. It wasn’t — the top of our house was alight. It was an incendiary bomb. As we were leaving the house there was another one, caught in the rafters. We had to run out of the house — my mother, my father, my brother, my aunt, my cousin and my grandmother. As we came out of the house it was like broad daylight, we were in a ring of fire. The Guildhall was burning, everywhere you looked you were literally surrounded by fire.

We had to leave in exactly what we stood up in. That raid lasted until 5 or 6 the following morning. We had to leave our house to go to a shelter in Somers Road, in the grounds of St Peter’s Church, but the shelter in the grounds was full, so we had to go down into the bowels of the church. That absolutely petrified me because we were going deeper and deeper underground. We were lucky because we hadn’t been in there long when there was a mighty explosion which shook the boiler room where we were. The explosion was a direct hit on the shelter in the grounds which we had tried to get to previously. We were down there for five or six hours; the raids were continuous all night — ten to twelve hours on Portsmouth that night.

When we eventually came out of the church, there was devastation all the way round, complete and utter devastation. There was no electricity, no gas, no water. It was like a scene of a movie. You would have to live through it to be able to imagine what it was like.

We made our way back to our house; we were tired, cold, hungry — it was January — and we hadn’t even been able to stop to get a coat, we just ran. When we got back to the road where we lived, our house was just gutted. We had nothing. Nothing left. My father decided to try to go to another aunt’s of ours in Fratton Road, but when we got to the top of Fratton Bridge, you could see very little remained of Fratton Road. So we didn’t know what to do, we just stood on the bridge. Don’t forget we had no money. A cattle truck came along and he offered to take us all as far as Barnham (my father had relations in Bognor Regis). The truck took us to Barnham Station, where we caught a train to Bognor — only one stop along the line as I remember. Then we descended on my uncle, my father’s brother — the whole lot of us.

We had only the clothes we stood up in. I had slippers on my feet, which were sodden because of walking through all the water in the streets in Portsmouth which were awash with water and debris. We wanted something to eat and drink. My aunt Rose offered to make us some cocoa. We were all sitting bunched together, all dejected and still terrified, and she had a whistling kettle which made a sound like when the bombs came down and we all dived under the table.

I have no idea where we got help from, all I know is that my mother got £75 compensation from the government for the loss of everything. I don’t know whether there was any insurance but all the places, buildings, were demolished. The £75 enabled us to buy clothes and we had to live in rented accommodation in Bognor. Eventually all the family, the other relations who were in Portsmouth who we hadn’t been able to contact, came to Bognor and we all lived there until we came back to Portsmouth in 1945. We were quite

near Ford and Tangmere Airports (temporary airfields) and I can remember later on, towards D-Day, the sky being black with wave after wave of planes and gliders, which seemed to go on for hours. Because we were near Ford and Tangmere we used to get a few bombs up there but mostly what the Germans would do was come in low and strafe the buildings with their guns. I suppose what they were trying to do was get to other airfields nearby where the aircraft were.

15 May 2004

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