大象传媒

As told by Mrs Waddington

A man called George and I travelled on the tube together. His wife had a baby. One day they sent for me and asked me if I'd seen him. I hadn't. They searched around. The Atherton Centre was a mortuary, and George and his wife were dead there. The baby wasn't touched. I wonder what she's doing now.

The rationing was one of the worst things. Little bits of cheese. We had dried egg, and that wasn't so bad. It was rotten, Mum was really up against it. You could get food if you could afford the Black Market.

I was bombed out of West Ham and I came here. That makes it over 60 years I've been here.
You'd get a bomb somewhere near, and your windows would be blown out. Within an hour men would come with trestles and black paper.
We shared our shelter with next door but one, who were a big family: two of their daughters came in with us. Queen Mary's Hospital got hit, and the shelter jumped up and down. The girls freaked out. We got our roof blown off, our water cut off and our faces blackened. The dog used to hide under the bed. My mother-in-law took us in. We lived in Vicarage Lane before we were bombed out. For a while we were in Friar Road, but the shelter was flooded. When the warning went we had no shelter, so we went under the table, and stayed there from six to midnight, when the all clear went. We said: we must have shelter. Houses were easy to get in London: people didn't want to live in London with all the bombs. We had a choice of three, and this one had the best shelter so we chose it. My brother who lived in Monega Road found our choice of three for us. It was damp in the shelters which is why so many of us have arthritis. We all had sand or water put by in case of incendiaries. We can laugh about it now but it was dreadful, raids every night. Two years down the bottom of the garden in a shelter.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.