大象传媒

"This story was submitted to the site by the 大象传媒's Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with the Dowager Duchess' permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

When the war broke out I was on an island in the Hebrides where my mother lived. It was quite difficult to get away because we had to go on a boat to the mainland of Mull to start with and then 11 miles across Mull and then another boat from there. Everything was in a state of turmoil so it wasn鈥檛 very easy, but I got to London in the end. In London everyone was in danger the whole time from 1940 onwards as the bombing was so fierce. I got married to Andrew Cavendish in April 1941 (He was to become the 11th Duke of Devonshire). It was at the end of one of most heaviest bombing weeks that there were. My parents lived in Rutland gate of Knightsbridge and there was a huge bomb that fell at the bottom of the street, destroyed two houses and destroyed all the windows in my fathers house. There was just masses and masses of glass on the floor everywhere. My mother was very clever and she put up wallpaper at the windows, pretending they were curtains, swept up the glass and continued as though nothing had happened with the reception for the wedding. My husband was in the army and he had one week off for our wedding and we went down to Eastbourne where my father in law had a house for our honeymoon. All the time the German planes were going over with a whooom, whooom noise for what seemed like hours. They weren't going to attack us in Eastbourne, but they were on their way to London, and it was such a strange feeling to think of that. A very odd time. Two years later, I had a baby and we settled in Derbyshire at a house in Ashford in the Water called the rookery and I stayed with my parents in law a lot at Churchdale near Ashford because at that time Chatsworth was a girls school. 300 girls and their teachers came and they must have been so cold, poor things. There was also very little water and practically no hot water. The old girls, when they come back for reunions, always say that they enjoyed it though, but whether they really did or not, I don't know. Chatsworth was inadvertently attacked twice. The son of the gardener and some other children were playing in the garden when a German plane came over and shot at them. They thought they were bees as they made a similar sound, but they suddenly realised that it was from this plane. They could actually see the pilot and they had waved at him because they thought he was English, and then bang went the guns. None of them were hurt thank goodness. It was a mixture between wonderful times and then these tragedies that happened one after the other.

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