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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Gladys Warminger and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was 24 when the war started, and living at home with my mother and younger brother and sister. It was a couple of years into the war, about 10 o’clock one evening, and we were then going down to the air raid shelter when we heard this whizzing come over. The next thing there was an explosion. Bang! Bang! Bang! We went into the cupboard because there was no time to get to the shelter. When we came out and went into the living room, we couldn’t see in there for smoke. In the meantime there was another bang. We didn’t know what this was until the next morning when we found out that a man who had been going down to his air raid shelter had been blown right back into his house.

Our windows were all blown in and there was glass everywhere. So we had to pack some things up and go up to my brother’s at the top of Mile Cross Road to stay the night. Well, the next night it was worse. They dropped flares and bombs at the same time. My brother and his wife were bombed out of their house in York Street (off the Unthank Road) so they came up to mother’s to be put up for the night. None of us could stay at mother’s so we packed our bags and started walking. We walked to Cawston where my sister-in-law’s family lived. We walked all the way up the Reepham Road, but from there mother, my brother and his wife managed to thumb a lift to Cawston. Me and my younger brother and sister had to walk the rest of the way. It wasn’t until the morning after we arrived that we found out that we were now living next to an aerodrome, so that didn’t feel very safe either!

Living in Cawston meant that I had a long walk to work in Norwich every day but I would usually be able to thumb a lift. I worked as a paint sprayer for a firm called Thompson’s, on Rosary Road near Chalk Hill. There were caves at Chalk Hill which we used as an air raid shelter, and one afternoon when we were in the caves, the works was machine-gunned and there were bullet-holes all along the wall in the works’ yard. That was the same afternoon as a whole lot of women were killed at the Carrow Works. My sister was there and saw it happen, and it took her a long time to get over it.

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