大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Val Plant of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Thelma Briggs and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

At the age of seven I was evacuated to the Hertfordshire countryside on the afternoon of 3rd September 1939, the day the war started. However, as my education was suffering I returned home in March 1940, just before the blitz started. School lessons were split into two alternate shifts: 8am to 12.20pm and 1pm to 5.30pm, both because of the lack of teachers who were in the forces and the possibility of the school being bombed as there were several munitions factories within 2-3 miles.

We had a dug-out shelter in the back garden which we used to sleep in in the early part of the bombing. This was not a very nice experience as it was very cramped. My father did fire watching duties several nights a week and was outside the shelter one night, ready to go on duty, when a bomb fell in the back garden of a house about 25 yards away. The blast blew him down the length of our garden.

Eventually we gave up using the shelter and slept downstairs in the house. I remember one night particularly when the City of London was fire-bombed and I was woken up to see the orange sky from the flames. There is a very famous photograph of this night showing St Paul's Cathedral standing proud smong the flames.

There were several occasions when it was impossible to reach school by the usual route due to bomb damage closing roads, also time bombs. Fortunately, there were several other ways to reach school and I never missed a day.

Apart from the noise of the bombs and planes there was a pom-pom gun stationed outside a house three doors away, which added to the noise and confusion.

During the Battle of Bosworth we used to watch the dogfights on our way home from school and great cheers would go up when a German plane was downed, also when the RAF returned home doing the "Victory Roll".

My father's business was the manufacture of gas bags which, when inflated, were placed over fractured gas mains. There were many occasions when he was called out in the middle of the night to supply these bags where the damage was severe. He drove all over London to deliver these during the height of the raids and at the end of the war the car had no running boards or wings after having been damaged by blasts.

In 1943/44 the Germans started sending over pilotless planes or flying bombs (V.1s). These were very frightening as, once the engine cut out, there was a silence and nobody knew where it would land. The waiting period was very scary. When I used to go to and from grammar school on my bike my mother told me that if I heard anything coming I was to crouch under the hedge in someone's garden. We agreed that if nothing happened in the ten minutes after I left home I would be safely in school.

The next things to come over were rockets (V.2s). There was no warning of these coming; the first thing anyone knew about them was when they actually exploded on houses. In some ways these were not quite so frightening as there was no silent waiting period as for the V.1s.

In 1944 there was a build up of army convoys on the arterial road going past school and early in June I was unable to get off the school grounds to go home as convoys were continuous, obviously making their way to the coast ready to sail for Normandy on D-Day.

Towards the end of the war food parcels began to arrive from Australia, which were distributed to school children. These contained rice, sweets and fruit which we had never seen before. Our diet before this had included half a pint of milk a day between a family of four; one egg each per fortnight, which was usually bad and which we could not risk boiling; tinned food was rationed by a points system and mean and cheese varied in quantity according to availability.

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