大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by Christopher Hall for Kent Libraries and Archives and Canterbury City Council Museums on behalf of Vera Synnock and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Battle of Britain (1940)
In 1940 during the Battle of Britain, as a schoolgirl I was in the Simon Langton shelter at the St. George's Street End behind what was then the Scotch Wool Shop. We were next to the entrance. The head girl was just above us being given individual coaching by a mistress for Oxford.
A plane was circling overhead and suddenly went into a steep dive and then another plane went into a dive and we heard the scream of a bomb. June and the mistress came running down the stairs. "He is trying to get Bell Harry" (the central tower of Canterbury Cathedral) they said just as the bomb exploded. All the lights went out and the blast swept through the shelter with loads of dust. The bomb fell in Burgate on the fur shop a few hundred yards away. The manager and cleaner were killed but the Maharanee of Baroda who was buying fur was safe. The second plane was a spitfire trying to shoot down the German plane. The din was unimaginable. We all thought our shelter had been hit further over.
I shall never forget the cool courage of Norah Campling, headmistress of the Langton Girls who walked round every corridor reassuring us that we were all safe and that the boys' end of the shelter had not been hit.
Within an hour my mother out in the country had been informed that the Langton shelter had been hit. She was frantic as she knew that was where I would be. How rumours spread. A young soldier who was billeted with us "borrowed" an army motor bike and went down to Canterbury to find out.
We were not compelled to go to school during the worst of the raids but were offered lessons by post. My friend and I elected to go to school. The girls in Canterbury were offered evacuation for about six weeks until things quietened down and the danger of invasion was over. The country girls had to stay put. The reason for this was that Canterbury as a garrison town would have been defended. What a hope.

After the Blitz (1942)
We returned to school on Thursday or what little was left of it. The piano had been moved into the playground and after we had picked our way over rubble and hosepipes (the buses stopped on the outskirts) we assembled. Again Miss Campling was her courageous self assuring us that no staff or pupils had been killed although a number had lost their homes.
The words of the hymn "0 God our help in ages past" had never been so real to us as the demolition men brought the remaining walls crashing down all round us.

Dood1ebugs-First Night (1944)
None of us ordinary folks knew what they were.

The invasion of Normandy had taken place a few days before. My mother was away and as I had been issued with a tin hat at work I went out with my ARP father soon after the siren went. At that stage we thought the objects were our bombers returning on fire.
Dad and I had come home for a cup of tea when we heard one coming and went out to look. It was passing over us when a searchlight crew in the next field opened up with a Lewis Gun. My father threw me in the back door and himself on top of me. After that we went back up to the ARP post at the top of Nackington Hill. There we could see dozens of these things flying over south of us. A retired major who was watching with us announced, "There are no men in them they are pilotless planes". A cold shiver went down my back. I was
more scared of those things than anything else in the war.

Of course the papers informed us next morning, flying bombs they said. The anti aircraft fire was ineffective and after a few days the fighter planes started to chase them in order to tip their wings and upset the mechanism so that they came down in the country before they got to London. It was an American pilot who referred to them as "those damn doodlebugs" and so they got their name.

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