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We’d come out to live here in Patchway, in 1938, though I was still going to school in Filton. I left school at the age of 14 in 1940, and I went to work at the grocery shop in Rodway Road, Patchway. I had to put up the rations, weighing out, the lot. All the men were gone, so we had to do the men’s jobs. My brother was an apprentice and he went into the Royal Army Service Corps, and they sent him to the desert, and we never saw him for the rest of the war. My sister was a woman trimmer at the BAC (Filton), fabric ailerons, elevators, etc; she stitched the fabric to the parts. You had to be good sewers for that! The dope broke her health in the end, went into her lungs, and she got pneumonia; she died young.

The Daylight raid on Filton Aircraft factory, September 1940

I can remember from the grocery shop you could look over the airfield. One day three children ran calling ‘Invasion, invasion’, and I went to the front of the shop. Well, all hell broke loose; I did watch that, I couldn’t move. I was lucky, the big shop windows were taped (or they might have shattered over me) I saw the bombs dropping from the aircraft. I was fourteen at the time, and I couldn’t move.
Next day the fighters were waiting for them. I saw those, they didn’t hang around then.

I can remember the houses in Station Road, and it was as if someone had taken a chopper and cleared the fronts of the houses off.

I don’t know how mum managed with the rations, there were four of us at home. All sorts went into the Christmas cakes, carrots and all sorts. We used to be allowed extra rations for Christmas. Sometimes mum used to make us apple tarts, and that.

When we lived in Pretoria Road the land drops down. This woman had sheets on the line. She heard the aircraft and dropped down the slope, below the level. Her sheets were all full of bullet holes. But down by the railway the balloons were up, and they got him. We were near the garage on the by-pass at that time; the guns were there, ‘Berky’s gun’. This was called after an Irish doctor. We could always recognise the sound of that gun.

This incident might have been on the day of the big raid: A pony and trap were going up the dual carriageway, Highwood Lane, past a little copse, and they never found either pony or trap; they must have been blown to smithereens.

My dad had been twenty-one years in the army, but in World War Two he was part of Dad’s Army, the Home Guard.

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