大象传媒

In 1940, during the war, I was 20 years old and working in a factory. One lunchtime some friends and I went onto the seafront in Yarmouth. We saw some planes firing: they started to fire but not at us. I saw the men so clearly and they saw us so they could have easily killed us at that moment.
We spent most of our days in shelters. The Germans ditched bombs going home, the bombs were left over from bombing London.
Several people I knew were killed in early morning raids. One of those people was a school friend. She was married and she was bringing up her little boy. She and her little boy and her unborn child were machine gunned and died. Yarmouth wasn't a very large community so we knew most of the people who were killed.

In 1941 I worked for the Co-op delivering milk, out on the roads at 4 o' clock in the morning. It was very hard work.
One day I went out for a walk with my friend. We went to see a German plane that had crashed. I saw the imprint of an airman whose parachute didn't open. It was more than a foot deep. I picked up an airman's glove, and inside it I saw a hand. It was burnt, I can still see the picture of his beautiful hand and nails in my head.
I had a baby at this time; my husband wasn't around because he was in the army in Dunkirk and then Singapore he was taken prisoner by the Japanese, he died in 1943 but I wasn't informed of his death until 12 years after.
I had 4 brothers in the forces, navy, air force and army, one was taken prisoner in Germany. His ship The Bendoin was torpedoed. The others came home.

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