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"This story was submitted to the site by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with Peter Thomas'permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

The day they bombed Rolls Royce in 1942 I know that at 8 o’clock in the morning my mother was looking out of the window. A girl in a white Mac came running down Osmaston Park Road followed by a German plane which came down the street, machine gunning the roofs. It was raining heavily that day. On the same morning my father was a gate man at Rolls Royce at Hawthorn street gate. A German plane came and bombed the steel stores. That morning he’d walked to the gate for a bit of a breather and a cigarette. The bomb fell and when he turned around the hut that he usually sat in looked as if a million moths had eaten it, it had been affected so much. He got shrapnel in his arms so had to have his arm bandaged and in a sling. Co-incidentally, the house next door to where his hut was, was my aunties. Her home was blown to pieces. My mother’s aunties lived in the high street and that got blown up too. For the small amount of bombs that fell in Derby my family didn’t do too well out of it.

After the war I worked taking sliding particians off the roof of the company. They had a handle on the top of the roof and they were wound across the roof. We had to go up and take them off. On top of the roof we discovered that painted on it was a pond, a lake, a church, a village, trees – it was made to look like the countryside to confuse the Germans and make them think that they weren’t looking at Rolls Royce at all.

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