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Phylis Terrell- this is her story.
Phyllis Terrell was a dancer in the Entertainments National Service Association. ENSA was a British organisation providing entertainment for the armed forces during World War II.

The beginning of the war.
Britain declared war on Germany on September 3rd 1939. I was 18 and a dancer in a show in Birmingham. The theatre was closed and I returned to my parents home in London. At that time I had no idea how the war would affect me personally.

In France
Not long after, the Theatre Manager for whom I worked, asked if I, along with three other girls, would go to France to entertain the troops. We were lucky enough to return to England the day before France collapsed to the Germans.

In London
To the average person in Britain the war meant blackout curtains in every window of the house and rationing. Everyone had their own ration book and rations were small. For a week, each person had 2ozs butter, 2ozs magarine, one egg, half-a-pint of milk, 2ozs bacon and 4ozs of meat. Clothing was also rationed.
Metal was collected up to be made into munitions and aircraft. If one had iron railings or gates on one's home they were taken for the war effort. Ours were taken and I can remember being quite upset as I had helped to design the gates.

Air raids
The siren which gave warning of an air raid was an eerie sound. Many people went into the air-raid shelter they had dug out in their gardens, or they went to deep shelters which had been made in various towns.
In London, the Underground Railway Tube Stations became almost home to people in the city centre and the East End. The Docks in the East of London were a particular target during air raids. People felt safe in the Underground Stations as they were hundreds of feet below ground.
The platforms of the Tube Stations were filled night after night, month after month when the bombing of London was at its height. The first daylight raid on London took place on 2nd and 3rd July 1940, but at the same time the RAF hit hundreds of German cities.
When the doodlebugs(V-1 bombs) were coming over London, one could hear the droaning sound of the engine. It would then cut out and we waited to hear the explosion. It was impossible to predict where it would land and we'd say "I wonder who got that one?"

The RAF
From August 1940 the British were able to detect enemy aircraft at a distance of 75 miles. This enabled the British planes to take off and meet the German Luftwaffe pilots before they could reach our coastline. It was at this time Winston Churchill spoke those famous words "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". During August 1940, 359 British aircraft were lost, but 653 German planes were destroyed.
In November 1940 the German air attacks were centred on the industrial towns in Britain. Liverpool was attacked on November 29th and shops, theatres and a church were hit. Two weeks before devastating attacks had been made on Birmingham, Coventry and Bristol.
The raid on Coventry went on for hours and much damage was done. We were returning from a show, when our coach was stopped and that was a night on which I grew up very fast.
A man was trying to get his very pregnant wife to hospital, but time ran out, and I and another girl helped to deliver the baby. It is amazing how one can cope when it is necessary. I wonder if they all survived the War and, if so, where they are now?
In 1944 Hitler launched the V-1 rocket from sites in Calais. This flying bomb was jet propelled and pilotless. It carried a ton of explosives at 370 miles per hour. After being pounded night after night for years this weapon was very hard on morale, people were just worn down and weary.

Family and friends
So many families lost loved ones. I was once in a show entertaining the RAF boys in Lincoln. We were always asked to stay after the show to be with the boys as they returned from their night-time raids over Germany.
One such night in September 1940, a young airman, Victor Sims, still in flying kit, appeared in the doorway, he looked at me and said my name. He was 19 at the time and we had been sweethearts at school together when we were aged 7 to 9.We chatted for some time that evening. I never saw him again as he was killed 3 days later on his next sortie over Germany. His picture is in my home to this day, 60 years later.
Fortunately my parent's home suffered very little damage, just a shell cap coming through the roof, entering my parent's bedroom and scorching the bedding.
My sister-in-law's home was completely flattened in a raid. I, along with other family members, searched among the rubble to try to find something of their home. Very little was found but, typically of the British spirit then, the people rejoiced that they were still alive and a home could be replaced at some time. At the time of the raid, thankfully , the people themselves were in an underground shelter.

A long love story
The War was over on May 7th 1945. I remember going to London with a Canadian airman, Donovan Sugden, who had got back to England just prior to the end of the War after spending 4 years in a German Prisoner of War camp.
We had met briefly at the beginning of the War when I was working in a theatre in Drury Lane and he had come over to England to fight with the Allies.
When his plane was shot down and he was captured, he sent his one permitted letter to me and I had continued writing to him throughout the time of his imprisonment. Naively I sometimes sent him a bar of chocolate fom my rations, but, of course, it never reached him. The Germans would take it out.
Donovan was one of a group of prisoners who escaped from their camp by digging a tunnel out. He escaped with Harold Phillip Calvert, known as "Cal", but they were found by the Germans sleeping by a haystack. When Cal bent down to tie his shoe laces up, one of his captors shot him dead while Don stood beside him. The gun was then turned on Don, but the other captor stopped his companion from shooting and Don was returned to the camp. Cal died on 20th May 1942 and Don remained a POW.
The end of the War was a strange time of upheaval and he went back to Canada. We went our separate ways and lost contact. We both married.
After his first wife died, he wrote, in the early 1980s, to a newspaper, local to where he last knew I lived, asking anyone, who knew of my whereabouts, to let me know that he was trying to get in touch. They did, but my husband was seriously ill at the time and I did nothing about it for a while.
After my husband died, I did make contact with him and, to cut a long story short, we were married in October 1982. We have now been happily married for 23 years.

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