大象传媒

Jean Herbert:
One Sunday lunch I remember being round my nana's house and I remember saying "I've got to go because a war has started", by the time I had got home the Battalions were already in the street, I remember the exact date of the start of the war, it was 11 o'clock on the 3rd of September 1939. I will never forget it.
I was 14 when the war started. I didn't have an Andersen shelter in my garden so I had to use a communal one that was a couple of streets away. I lived in Ipswich, in Elliot Street and I had to go to Handford Road: the shelter was in Handford Cut. I had to make the journey every time the air raid siren sounded. Sometimes it got a bit tedious so coming up towards the end of the war, instead of going over to the shelter we used to hide under the table instead. My father was in the home guard and from this I remember that the home guard used to muster in the street. My most prominent memory of the bombings was that which occurred at Derby Road Station.
I remember how I used to hear the planes fly overhead. We knew when the Brits had bombed successfully because the spitfires used to come overhead and do a victory roll. We always used to look at the planes flying over head when they came back because we used to look to see that all of them had come back, if there was one or more missing then we knew that they had got shot down.

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