大象传媒

When the war broke out I was living with my Father in a pub in Canning Town. It was called the Marquis of Salisbury where he was the Landlord. By now my mother and father was divorced so he had to look after us as well. There were four of us kids and I was eighteen at the time.

When the pub closed during the afternoon, my father usually liked to have a nap. Well, one day, quite a while into the war, it had been very quiet up till now, he was woken by a dreadful droning. No sirens, just this real heavy droning. We all heard him call us up. 鈥淜ids, quick, come up here and see this.鈥� So we ran upstairs and saw hundreds and hundreds of German bombers flying past. The sky was dark with them. It was now my father said that we were all to go down into the cellar. We had a wine cellar under the pub where we kept all the wines and so from this day we more or less lived in this cellar. We had two barmen working for us who also slept in the cellar with us. We laid boards across the floor and laid down on them to sleep. Week in and week out.

On the Saturday, when the Blitz had started, we got the all clear early on Sunday morning. We went out side and the sky was red with the flames for the Dock. They were just down the road from us. All the houses and building around us had gone. There was only burning rubble left. My fianc茅es family lived down the road opposite and their house had taken a direct hit, but as luck would have it, they were all in the shelter. They had lost everything. He had been allowed to come home to sort things out and while he was here we decided to get married. But the Blitz went on for weeks after that.

We planned to get married in Easter 1941 hoping he would be home after convoy duty. He was on the North Atlantic convoys to Newfoundland. Later he was to go on the Baltic Convoys to Russia. But you never knew when the ships were due in. Anyway, we had planned the wedding for Maundy Thursday. You could never get married on a weekend while running a pub. The night before the wedding my fianc茅e still hadn鈥檛 docked and then we had a huge raid. The vicar and the photographer were killed. There was a family with five small children living opposite us and they had caught a direct hit and we were there all night trying to dig them out but they had all been killed.

In the early hours I got a phone call to say he had docked in Liverpool and was making his way to London, all during this bad raid. When he got here he hadn鈥檛 got a ring or anything, so he went off with his sister to get one. We eventually had a white wedding with five bridesmaids and it all went of well. There was a fruit wedding cake that everyone had contributed to with their rations. You couldn鈥檛 fault the people of the East End. They were the salt of London and would help anyone out. The cake was small so we got a cardboard cover for it to make it look like a proper cake.

We moved into our house in Clifford road and lived next door to his parents. He had three sisters and five brothers. All the boys were in the war and every one of them came home.

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Keith Hartwell on behalf of Jessie Stratton and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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