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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jenny Christian of the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library on behalf of Joan Olive Pye and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions

April 27th was a Monday and it was also my 21st birthday. That was the night of the blitz. I was working at Sexton and Everard, shoemakers in Norwich. I used to do the progress book which showed where the shoes were in the factory.

On the Friday night before I dreamt we had an air raid and I told everyone about it when I went to work on the Saturday morning. I dreamt we were in the Anderson shelter and that there were two more people in there other than my family. I dreamt the bomb dropped outside the shelter. Our neighbours next door were Salvation Army people Mr and Mrs Chalmers. They normally didn’t go into the shelter - they said they would leave it to God’s will, but that night my parents invited them into the shelter – and they were the two extra people in my dream.

My dad was called Thomas Nicholls and he was an electrician at Woolworths. He was in the special police. Mr Cook was an ARP warden and the two of them went out on the Monday night when the siren went off to help get people into the shelters. They were near the City station which is where the bombs were dropped. Once they got everyone in to the shelter they came back to us in 24 Lothian Street, opposite Cushions the wood store.

There was one bomb dropped near to us. We got onto the landing after we heard the crash but the windows had all gone. The ceiling material fell down and my mum got a brush and pan to sweep it all up. Two minutes later there was another explosion and the whole ceiling came down.

There was a bomb at the bottom of Grapes Hill then another in Raglan Street near to the Lothian Public House. That hit a gas main which exploded. By this time we were down in the shelter. My boyfriend came down there as well. He had to cycle from Lakenham through all the shattered glass to get there. As soon as he arrived he had to go out again to report the burst gas main in Earlham Road.

Cushions was on fire. Bullen’s the paint place, that was on fire as well. There was nowhere not on fire. Wincarnis was on fire. The Regal cinema was on fire.

My family left the shelter the next morning and we were so tired we went out onto Mousehold and just went to sleep.

My aunt, who lived off Plumstead Road then took us in for a fortnight because there was an unexploded bomb outside our shelter – I’d dreamed about that too. You could see the bomb sticking out of the ground.

All there was left of my house was the bricks, nothing inside. Later they boarded up the windows. The funny thing was that my mum’s settee survived. You could always see where the tracer bullet went through. And my 21st birthday cards survived but they were all covered in soot. We weren’t allowed back at all. My mother lived in City Road with my uncle, who was a policeman, where she had half the house. There wasn’t room for me, so my boyfriend and I used to cycle out to Hethersett every day on a tandem to my aunt’s sister’s house. Sometimes we would leave in the dark and see the moon shining. We still have our tandem and we even cycled to Leicester on it once during the war.

I used to go to my mum’s house for my meals, and my boyfriend went onto work at Mann Egerton, the furnishers, where he worked for 63 years. (During the war they were doing war work so he was in a reserved occupation.) I was retained at Sexton and Everard for my job, but was then allowed to leave because of the Blitz as they were out of action as a factory. After that I went to work on coal rationing. The forms came in and we had to assess people in Norfolk for the amount of oil and coal they could have. This was at Tudor House in Rose Lane. I did this for three months, then I went to work at Laurence, Scott and Electromotors in the pattern office where they did the instruments for ships. The blueprints came in and Mr Beaumont used to assess them and we made work cards for the factory.

At the end of the war in 1945 they held a beauty competition at the Theatre Royal for a Miss Victory and my sister was chosen. Her name was Ruby Doreen, though she was known as Doreen. During the war she went with an American from the 8th army. She was engaged and everything. He was in the ground crew, his name was Howard Craft. Howard spent VE day with us all. He returned to America and she never heard from him again. Except that when my Mother died in 1976, we were clearing her things and found all the letters he had written. My mum had kept them all away from my sister. Howard would never have known that my sister never got his letters.

I remember going to the seaside with Howard and he used to bring things that you couldn’t buy, like a tin of pineapple that we opened with a penknife on the beach.

Our house was repaired after the war and I bought the house two doors down until it was compulsory purchased in the 1970’s for the rebuilding of Grapes Hill

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