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This contribution to People’s War was received by the Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Norfolk and submitted to the website with the permission and on behalf of Mrs Elizabeth Bencze
In 1940 we were living on the Norfolk coast. That year, there was a very real fear of an imminent invasion — I can remember the beaches being closed to the public and covered all over with tank traps, mines and barbed wire. That year my mother was taken ill and, for safety’s sake, sent me and a very much younger sister away to a small boarding school in Hampshire where my two older sisters had already settled in. I was eight and a half, my sister just two and a half.

One afternoon, all the pupils were out in the local park for their usual netball and hockey session. I remember a lone plane droning overhead and then, suddenly, a terrible explosion. The games teacher told us to lie down, which we did immediately but, out of curiosity, I turned my head towards the sound of the explosion. I could see a huge cloud of dust and smoke and, oddly, a brown armchair floating in the middle of it all.

After a few minutes, the teacher led us all to the park gates where a small crowd of townspeople had gathered. We were informed that our school had received a direct hit and was no more. It seems that the pilot of a German bomber on his way home had dropped one last, stray bomb. Kindly people picked off the girls in ones and tows and took them home. I was chosen by a bank manager and his wife — total strangers. I stayed with them for one night and was then passed on to another family — and then to another. Altogether I was passed round five or six families. I can’t remember their names, but they were all uniformly kind and helpful. Neither my parents nor the school had any idea where I was for a while.

There were only a few people in the school building when the bomb struck and, by some miracle, they all survived. Among them was my little sister who was having her afternoon rest at the time, and was rescued from the falling masonry by one of the kitchen staff.

I remember that all through these extraordinary events, I felt no particular anxiety. Things just seemed to happen to me and somehow I got through. Eventually, we all got back to Norfolk safe and sound — back to the invasion zone!

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