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This story was submitted to the People's War Site by Laya Sasikumar from CSV on behalf of Margaret Evans (nee Cossington) and has been added to the site with her permission. Margaret Evans fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was fifteen when the war broke out and living in Clapham Junction. It was Sunday morning, and immediately the air-raid siren started ringing. I think they were just testing it at the time because the raids didn’t start until the following year — in September 1940.

The council had put a brick shelter in our backyard. When the raids started we used our shelter. The noise was so bad because on Clapham Common they had anti-aircraft guns. They were there to shoot the bombers down — although I don’t think hey had much success! When we had to go down to the shelter, the echos were so bad we had to close our ears! I was actually really scared. Planes would be flying ahead, the guns would be going off — it was very frightening.

I started working in a Forces Club called the ‘Union Jack Club’. It was near Waterloo station and was mainly for the use of men in the navy, army and air force. Sometimes we’d have to provide meals for four hundred sailors just like that who may have been coming down from Portsmouth or elsewhere. You just got on with your everyday lives. There were very few raids during the day, so we knew that we were safe. But by about six o’clock you’d start getting your bedding ready to go down to a shelter as you knew that the bombs would be dropping soon.

I was there for about three years until the doodlebugs started. It was Derby Day in 1944 and I’d stayed late at the office. I just got home and my mother was in the shop, I went upstairs to make some tea. On my way down, everything suddenly just went black. We had been hit by a bomb. When the dust cleared I was sat on top of the tray of tea! People say that if you’re that close to bomb, you never hear it go off and you just get the aftermath. The hairpins in my hair and my mothers hair had fallen out of our heads, so our hair was sticking up like we’d been electrocuted! Surprisingly, my parents and I were uninjured. There was a row of about seven shops, and one person was killed. We were very lucky because the casualties could have been much higher.

Unfortunately my parents business was completely ruined. The staircase had completely crumbled through. We lost the business, all our stock and our home. Although it seems very bad looking at it now, at the time you just had to accept it and move on. We moved what furniture we could — anything that had survived the blast —
and moved it to a flat we’d found.

We soon moved in with relatives in Essex, where I worked on the land Not long after we’d moved there I remember getting ready to go out to the pub with my cousin, when we saw a doodlebug heading our way. We quickly ran for cover in a ditch and ducked as low as we could. When we came back up we had mud-stains up to our knees!

Because the war went on for so long you almost became hardened to it. We simply had to learn to act on impulse in situations that we would have never envisaged.

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