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Hello, my name is Eve and I am going to give you some recollections of the Second World War, especially about the bombs that fell on Bexhill on 29th September 1940. I will also tell you about my working life in Bexhill before and during the War. Bexhill-on-Sea is a town on the Sussex coast. When I gave my story, in 2005, I was 86 years of age. I told my story to Andrew Voyce, an Open University graduate, who has transcribed my words.

(There were many changes after the war.) Before the war, you had to pay if you wanted an ambulance to call for an emergency. We were in the Equitable and another thing. It was all- pay for everything. I don’t know how my Mum brought us up, she was left a widow when I was twelve. I do not know how she brought us up, really. Three of us. The Equitable covered a lot of expenses with hospital. I don’t know if they’re still going now. Perhaps doing something different now. Times were very hard, and we didn’t have a lot. But we did appreciate what we saved for. They have all these things, my mind boggles at what they’ve got today. If we wanted something, you saved for it. If it wasn’t in your purse you didn’t have it. But I can’t say there was the tension then. We were very hard up, because we didn’t have other things, then, did we? We never had a radio until my brother went out to work. He was friendly with the bloke who ran the shop here. A shilling a week, we had the radio.

I went into service, and I went daily as a fourteen-year-old . I worked long hours, half a crown a week. They were training me. I didn’t do much with half a crown a week. Mr Page paid One Pound Ten in old money. It was hardly worth our shoe leather walking there. Then we started a union- that caused some ruckuses. He had little chats with us: How could we do it to him? Oh, my Gosh. He was a proper old…he was never… should have been in charge of a big thing like that, but that was Government order, you see! The government encouraged unions. I expect he got something for having them. For each person he got there, I don’t know. But, I don’t know all the political details. (Mr Page was a bit of an old-fashioned type- oh yes!) Poor man. And of course when it got that more women came, and their husbands walked in the garage, they just went. But the Government order was to keep the machines going. And if someone stopped, the foreman stopped them going, and the foremen went in the office. The foremen said to me, ‘I went in the office for some other reason.’ Well, he said it was to help interview some other person or something. And he said to me: You know, women come in here and cry, I can’t say no. So he said: If I give you an extra three shillings a week, will you be a go-between? So he made me an unofficial forewoman, if you like. Well, I wasn’t a forewoman, really, but I had to go and speak on their behalf. Which, I didn’t care- it didn’t worry me. Well I had three shillings extra for that. Ha! Laugh, Oh I laugh about it now when I think about it!

I never smoked. All my family smoked, why because it was a fashion. All my three children smoked. And my husband. But I, I never did. They tried to get me on it, on nights, because you know it’s damned difficult to keep awake at nights, with the turning of the machines. They’d say: Come on, Eve, have a cigarette. I used to take it, take two puffs, put it somewhere and find it’d burned itself out. My daughter said, You never inhaled, Mum. I says, I don’t know what you mean by inhaling, ‘cos I don’t know anything about it anyway. My husband was in the war, he was only nineteen. He got a cigarette ration, in a tin. I never saw it, but that’s what he said. They were in the desert for four and a half years. He was in the Eighth Army in North Africa. We got married before he went, it was his idea. Well only ‘cos he wanted to. I said it’s a waste of time getting married when he was going away. Yes, we got married the end of ’40. And that was put off because of the invasion standby. We should have got married in the September but everything came to a dead halt. Nobody moved anywhere. Then he came home in the middle of the night. We’d had a DREADFUL day in Bexhill! Oh! We lost three people in Devonshire Road. They bombed most of, well half of Devonshire Road. We lost the Maypole, a dairy, we lost Flynn’s the dry cleaners, two people were killed in the dry cleaners. My sister worked across the road in what is Gamleys now, it was Barkers, and all the glass in the shop, it cut them. And it happened at quarter past eight in the morning. A very bad time. I was working at a hotel near the Clock Tower. It was called the Arundel, then. It goes that way, down to the museum. I’d just come out the dining room, cos I went there as a parlour maid, because the people I worked for as a cook went down to the West Country. I could’ve gone with them, but I didn’t want to. She was very annoyed with me ‘cos I wouldn’t go. Anyway, I’d just come out of the dining room and we had the maid’s door, you see, there’s the maid’s door. We had this HUGE kitchen, the woman had, with about four great big AGA cookers. It was huge hotel. She owned the hotel and she did the cooking- well her mother owned the hotel- not as big as some in Bexhill, but it was biggish. But what they had were live-in clients as well as people coming on holiday. All we’d got were the doctors, as they’d sent their wives away. And they were living in our place, the doctors, and carrying on their duties. One of them always had porridge in the morning. Anyway, I came out of the dining room, and…I didn’t hear anything. By this baize door came, and knocked everything out of my hand. There was me with the tray, you know, and CRASH! You never heard such a noise in all your life. We WERE close to it. Where the hotel was, that’s the Arundel, there was a whole row of houses up to the end of Sackville Road, between us, all up Egerton Road. And what they bombed was outside what was the Metropole Hotel. It’s not there now, but, they bombed outside of it, it went that way, like the putting course goes (now), used to be the hotel. It was a glamorous hotel, you’d have furs and all that. And it had a lovely front. Evidently, there was all the mains, for the water, and the gas, and everything. I didn’t see it cos I was in the hotel, but as I went, collecting myself, through there, the lady who owned the place, was hanging onto the cookers, and she said: I can’t go and look, she said, I think the back of the hotel’s gone. So I crawls through the kitchen, out to where there were big sinks for washing up. Nothing in our place was gone. The only thing that happened was: we had old fashioned chimneys, and fireplaces, and EVERY ROOM in the hotel had soot over it. We spent the rest of the day mopping up this soot. Anyway I was allowed to go home in the afternoon, ‘course when I got home I realised what had happened to Devonshire Road. The delivery people came in and said- it’s an awful day for Bexhill. But didn’t give any details. That was the 29th of September 1940. Towards the end of the Battle of Britain, We didn’t get it as bad as people in London. But ours was all, what can I say…’wanting to get rid of his bombs’ business. On their way back. And it was always early. He did no end of damage, all down the end of Amherst Road. He must have dropped the whole load on Bexhill, I reckon. That’s what he did to our end of the town. So that was on a Monday, I know that.

Then I worked to half past nine at night, I tell you. I had to be there at seven, I was living at home, but I had to be there at seven, so I had to be up at six to be down from near the hospital to be on duty by seven, and I had a break in the afternoon and left at half past nine. I got a pound a week. One pound. And when I’ve told my kids : Mum, what d’you mean a pound? D’you know I was glad of that job, because the people I worked for had cleared off, and I lived in with that job where I was cook. Well they cleared off and I went home, ‘cos I got Mum, lived near the hospital. And I couldn’t live off her and not pay her, could I? So I answered this advertisement and it was at that hotel. I was there, I suppose, seven or eight months. I’ve lost count really. In the following March I got the call from the Ministry of Labour. Yes, March of ’41. I went down to see Mr Page, and took the green card with me, and he took us on; he took me and two other ladies on. We started on the Monday. After the war had finished, the men never came home till ’46. They had to be demobbed in their age group. Although they went up early- I mean he was only 19, when he came back I was twenty-eight. And I was twenty-one when I got married. It took all…I’ve always said we gave the best years of our lives to this country. He came home, I suppose I was twenty-seven, I had my first child when I was twenty-eight. I carried on with Mr Page till a bit after the end of the war. I worked for Mr Page from August ’41 to August ’45. ‘Cos he came home on leave, they moved them from the desert all up through Italy. Then from Italy they went to Greece, that was doing a sort of, like they did in Northern Ireland. Because they were at war with each other out there. Then they realised that the men weren’t going to be demobbed till the following year, so they flew them home for 28 days leave. God, that was awful going back after 28 days leave then. But for the men it must have been agony. They’d still got to be there till the next year. They came home in the April. Actually my brother was in the same- well not actually with him- in the desert. Do you know, he was only seventeen and a half, he was in the Territorials. My husband was six months younger than me, we were the same age at a certain time of the year. He was what I’d call a- well how can I describe him?- they were thoroughly good men, because they hadn’t had anything to be otherwise, had they? They didn’t do anything. They hadn’t been out of Bexhill so they didn’t know the world, did they…But he was a bit of a joker. Do you know, it completely changed him. Serious- they had the stuffing knocked out of them. Now my brother visits me once a week. He nowadays says more about the war than in the years in between. Funny, isn’t it? When anniversaries come up, he speaks about it. But there you go.

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