大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Melantha and Jamie, pupils from Teversham Primary School on behalf of Eileen Hollingsbee and has been added to the site with her permission. Eileen Hollingsbee fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was 7 when the war started. When I was 9 and then again when I was 10, I was shot at twice by a planes machine gun. One came from the sea when a group of us were going to school and we lay down and crawled under the hedge. The second time was on a Sunday in the garden when the plane came over the hill firing all the time. I fell over a tree stump when I ran for the shelter. The bullet missed me by about 12 inches.

I didn鈥檛 go to school for 13 weeks when the war started, when they built the Andersen shelters. I remember the night of the big Blitz in Portsmouth and I was very worried about my Daddy. He was fire watching on top of the sail loft. The next day he had to walk 11 miles home through streets that were on fire. He started work at 6 in the morning and came back at 12 noon. We were accommodating people who had been bombed out of their houses. The next street to us had got bombed and we felt the blast. We lost my canary Joey who was 9 years old. My Uncle had brought him back from the Middle East when I was 4.

I also remember growing mushrooms and liking watercress and spam and dried eggs that had been made into omelette or scrambled eggs. I remember breeding rabbits in our back garden and 1 man kept pigs. We swapped things when we could. One day me and 5 of my friends went to play in the woods and pick wild flowers and we found some land mines hanging from their parachutes in the trees. We ran all the way home and told my Mum and she told the police - we weren鈥檛 allowed in the woods for a week.

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