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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Edna Gooda and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

We didn’t really know what the war was about when it started. My Mum was worried because my brother was a couple of years older than me and was in the boys’ service in the Navy. When Mum heard the news that the war had started the first thing she did was sit down and write a letter to him.

I had been working in a shoe factory from the age of fourteen. At the age of 17 I got myself a job delivering milk. At first I worked with another lady because I was so young. The round went right through the city and to the outskirts. Within six weeks of starting I was asked if I would take on a round by myself, delivering along the Cromer Road near the aerodrome. The milk was in a barrel and I pushed it by a shaft, walking the entire round. When I ran out of milk I had to walk back to the base, refill and then do the rest of the round. Part of my job was to ring people’s doorbells as I went round, to wake them up in time for work. By the time I was 18 I was working on the buses, and then I was stuck there until the end of the war.

With the air raids in Norwich we had to leave our house. We went into the country to stay with a friend of the family, and I had to cycle miles to get to work. During the Blitz there were so many holes in the road from the bombing that I had to meander all over the place to get along the street. You could take no direct routes through the city. It was such a shock to see all this destruction, and there was trouble all over the place.

A lot of young people didn’t understand what the war was about or how it affected them until the bombing started. Norwich had been a very quiet place and the war woke us up.

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