大象传媒

When I was 14 I was walking to see my grandmother, as I did every Monday afternoon, I had to walk down a hill and in front of me I could see over Biggin Hill and Croydon airport.

I stopped and looked at the aircraft fighting, but there was no television in these days, so you didn鈥檛 know what was going on, I didn鈥檛 know until I moved to Cheltenham when I was married in 1946, that it was the Battle of Britain I had been watching.

Living in Croydon, and it was badly bombed, I had a lot of stories The Germans couldn鈥檛 get into London with the barrage, so they used to drop the bombs on Croydon and go back home.

I used to walk home every night from work for months and months in an air raid, It was a three-quarter-hour walk. The Surrey Docks lit up my way one night when they were on fire.

I used to go to the pictures, and a notice would go up that an air raid as on if we wanted to leave, but I always stayed on and chanced it.

I went into the Women鈥檚 Land Army, where I met my husband. He had to go into the Army before the war started. He was 21 on June 5, and he had to go into the military at the beginning of July. He was the first fellow to go from Prestbury, which was a village then.

He went over to France and at Dunkirk, he was still miles behind and he didn鈥檛 arrive back in Britain until June 21st, and all those behind arrived at Plymouth. He said the Germans were only a short distance behind them, but we never hear anything about them, only about Dunkirk.

When I met him, I was in a hostel at Ottershaw, Surrey and he was stationed at Chertsey. One night he had said goodnight to me at the hostel, and he had about 1 陆 miles to get back to camp, between our W.L.A hostel and the army camp were dumps of ammunition at frequent distances. I鈥檇 just got in my bunk and a bang went off, then another and another, and that went on for a while. I heard from him that day that they had all been moved to Ascot as it was all these ammunitions dumps had gone up. So they had to evacuate the camp.

I used to go home every weekend, but one weekend we had to work all day Saturday so I went on Sunday morning. I got off the train at Croydon, and caught the bus to the road where I lived, and I heard somebody say, Pawsons Road got it last night, a thing called a doodle bug.

We鈥檇 never had them over before and the first one landed where my family were. I was wondering what I would find but we always used the Anderson shelter. A batch of houses just up the road all had Morrison shelters (a kind of reinforced metal cage that you put up indoors and could be used as a table) and everybody there was killed.

After the doodle bugs arrived it was the rockets. I used to leave home at four o鈥檆lock on the Monday morning to get my train back to Woking and all the way walking I could keep hearing explosions. You didn鈥檛 hear anything coming.

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