大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Joan Smith for Three Counties Action on behalf of Cora Portillo and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was 20 when war broke out and a student at Oxford reading Spanish and French, and I had won a scholarship with an essay for a summer course at Besancon in France in July 1939. Our hosts didn't seem to fear that war was imminent, but the British students decided to leave. From the train we watched as a young Scot who was going to enlist said goodbye to his Czech girlfriend and we all wept with them. When we got to Paris the station was in complete darkness and there were no porters. The cross-channel boat was very crowded and we had to lie on deck. I didn't want to return to my home in Scotland but instead to go to the colony of Basque refugee children in a village near Oxford and my college, where I used to spend every weekend. On Sunday 3rd August we listened to the radio and heard the fateful words of the declaration of war against Germany. A quarter of an hour later the air-raid siren howled and the children, aged from seven to sixteen, suddenly recalled their trauma in beleaguerd Bilbao. They panicked, hid under furniture, screamed and cried. It was a long time before they could be comforted by the 'all clear'siren.

When I left collegeI started my obligatory war work in the 大象传媒 Latin American service. I stayed in a flat in south London provided by a very generous young man from Oxford for Spanish refugees(one of them was my fiance). We had a bombing attack nearly every night and my husband and I went down into the Gloucester Road Tube station where we slept on Count Tolstoy's fireside rug. One night we heard explosions particularly close and when we reached the flat most of the windows were broken. When we looked from the street down the area steps we saw a huge pointed triangle of glass was jutting out of the mattress where I normally would have slept. So after that we had to find somewhere safer to live. Count Tolstoy made a claim for damage to his rug!

When I was about to take finals a large number of Dunkirk survivors were brought to Oxford and occupied the Radcliffe hospital and the Examinations Schools. We were asked to talk to them but we found they were too shocked and traumatised, wandering aimlessly in the streets.
We felt that the Germans might arrive any day. We lost all fear of the fimnal exams because we might have no future - so I decided just to do my best and I got a first.

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