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BOMBS ON BASINGSTOKE by Phyllis Ferguson

This is an edited version of an interview by Georgina White on 1st August 204. The original recording and full transcript are in the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, ref. BAHS 123. © Basingstoke Talking History.

[Phyllis was off school with a bad leg.]

Cliddesden Road
I was sitting here one afternoon with my mother when there was a most awful crash, so we hurtled down the cellar underneath here and sat there for about half an hour and thought, ‘Well, the siren didn’t go or anything,’ and we discovered later it was when the bomb fell in Cliddesden Road. And of course we were quite near Fairfield’s School where I should have been and we certainly felt it from here.

Church Square
When the bombs fell in Church Street, my father was an Air-raid Warden and Church Square was on his patch and he was one of the first to arrive and he was very upset by the sight of Rosemary from the music shop who was lying dead on the pavement. And the whole Square shattered. He was very, very upset by all of that.

Cromwell Road
And one afternoon I can remember us all being out in the garden and we saw some planes coming up the Railway Line and we just watched them go by and then somebody said, ‘They’re German,’ and, with that, bombs came down and hit Cromwell Road. But I was so young, I thought, ‘Well, this is what happens, I suppose.’

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