大象传媒

Pat and Hilda tell this story together:
Hilda: During the war I worked in what had been the old School Room, that was taken over and opened up as YMCA for the troops, and I used to work over there quite a lot. I had been on duty in the afternoon, it was a sunny afternoon, and I just popped over home because I wanted to have a quick wash, and I was just going back to help out with the evening shift, and our eldest brother said, 'Where do you think you're going?'.'I'm going back to the YMCA' I said, but he said, 'Oh no, you're not, get back under those stairs. Look at that'. And you could see all the red glow where they'd had a raid on Bristol. God knows what it was like down there, but it looked terrible from where we were. You couldn't see the actual fires, but you could see the terrible glow in the sky.

And then there was the time in 1940 when the Works (aircraft factory) were bombed, and we were in this shelter, and it felt as if you were on a boat, it shook so. And near the YMCA there was a long wooden hut which used to be the church hut, and they'd taken over these places just to take the bodies, and it was awful to see all these lorries going past, and you could tell there were bodies on there, just covered.

Pat: During the war I suppose we all had to get on with it, life still went on. And then at night when the sirens went, you had to get up and go under the stairs, or to the shelter. And at times the family next door, he was a lorry driver; sometimes he would bring the lorry home and if we thought there was going to be a bad raid we'd all of us get on the back of the lorry and go out in the country until it was all over. I can remember one night we stopped in a lane, and all of a sudden the other side of the hedge was an Ack-Ack,(anti-aircraft gun) and it opened up and frightened the life out of us.

Hilda: They thought there was an unexploded bomb in the house next door, so we had to get out, and we were going to a friend's wedding the next day, and so we were walking with our best clothes in our hands. We got to the top of the road and there were some ARP men there who said 'where do you reckon you lot are going?' and we said we'd been told to go to Shield Road School, and he said 'Oh no you don't', there's bombs'. So we had to turn around and come back, and we didn't know where to go, and the woman who had the Horse Shoe Inn, she took us in. She didn't give us a drink, we had nothing, and we sat there all night, on our chairs, waiting for the day to come. It was a terrible night.

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