- Contributed byÌý
- salisburysouthwilts
- People in story:Ìý
- Molly Carey 2
- Article ID:Ìý
- A4436084
- Contributed on:Ìý
- 12 July 2005
After about 2½ years there we were moved to London to Woolwich Arsenal. We were at an Ack Ack unit and we used to sleep down in the bomb shelter. They were deep shelters so if you were on duty you would have an Anderson shelter at the top and there you would have creepy crawlies over you all night, big furry spiders creeping over you and if you weren’t on duty you were in the deep shelters with rats as big as dogs that straggled all over the beds. We used to hear the buzz bombs going over and but we were just grateful that we were somewhere safe. We got used to it. I remember this Ack Ack gun that we were in and I was cooking at the officers’ mess ant the time. It was up some steps in a little hut and I remember I was making a beer cake at the time with the cat, a ginger one, in the window. Then the siren went and I looked up and there was two buzz bombs one to the right of us and one to the left., but as sometimes they veered I thought ‘Hello, I shall have to get somewhere’ But the only place I could go was in the corridor and I opened the windows as we had been taught so the blast wouldn’t blow the windows out.
As I was standing there, a major came in then the bomb dropped right just the other side of the fence from our camp so we just got some blast. I sort of was blown a little bit along the passage. The major and I picked ourselves up and we stared, because coming out of the kitchen was, covered in cake mixture, his tail round him and glowering eyes looking out of the cake mixture, was the cat! He walked past us rather dignified then he shot across the camp and disappeared. The major said ‘Good Lord’. I just scooped the rest of the mixture back into the tin and cooked it and the officers said it was a very good beer cake. ‘Yes I said, and a good dirt cake as well!’
The soldiers got the cat and washed him and brought him back to me. I believe that they had to get him down from a pole. That was very hilarious!
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