大象传媒

INTRODUCTION

My name is Grace Doe. I was born Grace Seager in 1916 in Victoria Place, Southwark, South London. It was a little court we lived in there, in Union Street. There were eight houses in our court and a church hall where they had nativity plays every Christmas. We weren't far from the Royal Mail Sorting Office in Orange Street. I went to Orange Street School.

I remember there was a High Church, All Hallows, in Pepper Street. There were some nuns, a Sister Grace and a Sister Ethel, who lived up one end of the court who used to take us on outings. I was named after Sister Grace and one of my sister's after Sister Ethel. They had two servants called Rose and May. We were moved out of Victoria Place because of the Thames continually bursting its banks and flooding us out.

These are a few of my recollections of the war.

MY WAR DIARY

My sister Rose鈥檚 husband was a policeman. Tom Williams was his name. Soon after war broke out, the German U-boats were sinking all our shipping. Tom got so angry he said: 鈥淚鈥檒l get the bastards!鈥� He went into the Navy. Just one week after, the ship he was serving on went down with all hands, sunk by a German submarine. They鈥檇 got him. We were all heartbroken.

I was a lift attendant in High Holborn. Tom had got me that job after I left the Eel and Pie shop I worked at. They were twisters there. They kept putting the pennies aside. I knew they were doing it. I'm not silly. Then, I got the blame. They said they were going to call the police, but my brother-in-law, Tom, came round and told them plain, 'Grace isn't like that!' and warned them off. That made them think twice. They knew where the pennies were going right enough.

I talked to everybody. You might think being a Lift attendant would be a boring job, but I like talking to people and it was all very friendly. One of the office workers lent me her copy of 'Gone With The Wind'. It was a thick hardback book with so many pages I thought I would never finish it. I was so pleased she had lent it to me. We both loved Clark Gable.

The next day, she didn鈥檛 come into work. I didn't think too much of it. People do have days off. But she didn't come in the next or the next. I began to get concerned. I asked after her but I never saw her again after that so I couldn't return the book to her. I think she might have died in the bombing. I never found out. I鈥檝e kept that book to this day!

I went on to work at Fortiphones, soldering for the tanks. Fortiphones was a huge factory. It was just by the Gaumont cinema in Peckham. We worked up on the second floor. I had these bits of metal with holes in. I had to put the wires through the holes. You had to twist the bare wire round, then solder it on to the connection. You had to put the yellow flux on and then burn the wires on with the soldering iron. The smell would go right up my nose! It wasn't very pleasant, as you can imagine, especially as there were so many of us all soldering.

There was a roll of black wire I remember. The wires were cut for you and you had to make sure you did all the connections securely. Our lads鈥� lives depended on it. They were leads about 18 inches long. There was one woman there; all her wires were cut short. She had stripped the casing to bare the wire and stripped most of the wire off, too! I had to keep passing her work back. I told Cath, one of our foreladies. There were two foreladies. 'Look at this,' I said. 'This isn't right.' I couldn鈥檛 let that go on and I had to tell her.

They would bring a cup of tea round to us but I don't recall there was a canteen or anything. We just kept working. Sometimes, we'd hear the planes and we'd go up on the roof in our lunch break. We'd watch them fighting overhead! Can you just imagine? I don't know why I wasn't frightened. I should have been, I suppose. I just wasn't. They were up there shooting at each other. I never thought I'd see such a sight. I'd seen the big Zeppelins. I'd seen one over Hastings. But I never thought I'd see this.

Most days, though, I'd go home to lunch. I had to cook my dad a dinner. My mum died in 1937 with cancer and he was on his own poor devil. It took 15 minutes to get there and back. I don't know how I did it all. I was only 5 stone but I was wiry, the smallest of the bunch my mum said. She said she could have put me in a pint pot!

They told her in the hospital she was going home to die. And that's what she did. That was unkind of them to say it like that. They shouldn't have said that and sent her home like that. She was in terrible pain poor girl. We pulled a big ball from her and my dad said to burn it. My sisters put pennies on her eyes and laid her out.

At the end of the day's shift, they'd have volunteers to do firewatching. We'd take it in turns. There'd be three of us. We'd walk about the factory floor keeping watch in case an incendiary came down. It would be our job to raise the alarm and get it tackled before it could take a hold. We'd stay about three hours on patrol, and then the two watchmen would come and lock up.

Night after night of the blackout we had. We'd take a flask of tea down the shelter and sit and chat down there. Every night at nine o'clock, though, I used to go and stand at the shelter and look out. I was the only one looking out like that. I must say I felt quite brave, although, you might think me rather foolish. The searchlights and the flashes of the anti-aircraft guns lit up the sky. It was all a sight.

The guns were up on Dogkennel Hill. Even inside the shelter, you could feel the 'thump, thump' of them vibrating. I think they were trying to get the railway line. It was over that way. Their bombs were falling short and coming our way instead. And then there were the barrage balloons. I used to peer out and watch it all. It really was all such a sight what with all the bangs and explosions and everything. I just never imagined I'd grow up to see such things.

We were living in Dulwich when we got bombed out. We鈥檇 moved there some years before from Victoria Place in Union Street, Southwark. That's where my mum died. It was a little court we lived in there, and there were some nuns who lived up one end who used to take us on outings. We were moved out because of the Thames continually flooding its banks. We had to go. Flooded out; now, bombed out!

The curtains fell down with the blast. There were shouts of 'Turn out those lights!' and the Wardens got us all down the shelter quick. It was a bad night. A very bad night. And the shelter next to ours suffered 37 people killed.

It was a direct hit. They were brick shelters, solid, but nothing's going to stand up to that. And it didn't. It could as easily have been us. Why we survived and not them I'll never know. It's all just chance, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Council were very good. They got all our stuff together, dried it out, what could be salvaged, furniture and all, and put it into storage for us. We were really worried, though, because dad had put his pension money he got from when he retired from Reynolds into his mattress! He had his pension of 10 shillings a week, but this was the lump sum he received.

I went and checked it all to see what had survived. We thought the mattress might have got destroyed in the bombing. Worse, if it had survived in one piece, we thought the money would be gone or damaged and sodden by the fire engines and the burst water mains. Miraculously, it was all still there in one piece!

You might think him foolish to keep his money there, but we didn't have bank accounts or anything. Only the well-to-do had bank accounts. I think you'd be surprised just how many people did keep their spare cash in places like that - in vases, under loose floorboards. But I had been foolish!

I had already paid the rent and I had to go to the Council to get the money back. My old dad called me a silly so and so. How are you going to get the rent back now, he said? But I got the rent money back alright. They couldn鈥檛 charge us rent on a bombed out property after all!

The Council had done us proud. I don't know how we would have managed to cope with it all on our own. Well, we wouldn't, not really. It's as well everyone pulls together at times like that. Everyone feels for everyone else.

We hunted around and found a flat in Grovehill Road with a Mrs Mc Neill. The rent was 16 shillings and 6 pence a week. There was a pub on the corner, but I don't remember its name. My old dad, Gilbert Seager, a retired compositor with Reynolds press, used to drink in there with his pal, Bert Rodgers, who lived nearby.

When my dad was working at Reynolds, he used to come home after his long shift and give me the Sunday edition fresh off the press. Reynolds was a Sunday paper. I used to walk proudly out with it and I'd hear people whisper, 'How'd she get the Sunday paper, it's not out yet!' Sometimes, they'd ask me direct, out loud, and I'd tell them my dad worked at the paper. That made me feel really proud as you can imagine.

One evening, - it was in September 1943, I believe - I saw an incendiary bomb come down on my sister Ethel鈥檚 roof. I had to run into the pub to get her. The two Wardens were in there, too, having a drink when they should have been out keeping watch. They dashed out and saw to the fire before it took a hold. It was very brave of them. It was lucky I saw the bomb fall.

The shelter there had forms to sit on. They ran from one end of the shelter to the other. We used to get a flask of tea to drink. I saw a parachute come down one night. It was caught in the searchlights, all lit up, white like a big moth. I thought it might be a German pilot and I reported it to the Warden. I thought it might be old Hess! But of course he came down in Scotland somewhere.

One night, we stayed at my sister Addie鈥檚 Anderson shelter. After the raid, we went back home. We got to the steps where we lived and there was this strange man with a funny helmet and goggles standing under the block of flats, signalling. I said he must be signalling to the German planes!

Whatever should we do? Well, I can tell you what we did. We all ran inside with such a start that we left our handbags on the steps. We were so scared we didn鈥檛 dare go out until the following morning. We thought our bags would be gone, but they were still there. Thankfully, though, the weird man had gone.

It was early in 1944. Rose was having her baby at home in St Noria street in Dulwich. This was her second child by her second husband, Bill Fowles. She was lying on a big metal table in the front room. There was a raid going on at the time. The bombs were dropping. There were explosions everywhere! I was sheltering under the table with Derek, her little boy, and she passed the baby, Sheila, down to me under the table. She couldn鈥檛 get off the table because she'd just had the baby.

My sister, Rose, went out with my other sister Olive, that same year. A buzzbomb blast knocked her head with such a force against the wall she had headaches after that all the time. Poor girl, she eventually died from a brain tumour. I swear it was the blast that did it.

Towards the end of the war, we had more of the doodlebugs. They used to make a noise as they went over. You knew you were safe as long as you could hear the noise of their engines. It was when they stopped you had to worry. It was scary. It was a scary time for us all. And I don't think I'll ever forget it, even after all these years, even though so much seems so far off and distant now.

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