大象传媒

I will always remember September the 3rd 1939 when a voice on the wireless said 鈥渁t 11 o鈥檆lock, the Prime Minister will be making a special announcement鈥� and so we waited, and at 11 o鈥檆lock precisely the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told us that he had had no answer to his request from Adolf Hitler, and so we are now at war with Germany. It came as a shock to us, but we knew that Hitler鈥檚 armies were taking everything in the countries of Europe before them, and we would have to fight for our lives. When we heard of the atrocities that were going on as the Germans were going forward it was terrible.

After the Prime Minister had spoken that Sunday morning it wasn鈥檛 long before the sirens went, but thankfully it was a false alarm, but it wasn鈥檛 long before the German airforce began to come over our area to get to Birmingham and Coventry and other towns and cities. I remember coming home from work one night and my Mother telling me that the sirens had gone and she went upstairs and looked through the bedroom window and saw a battle between German planes and our planes over Austin Motorworks. I shall never forget the night that Coventry was bombed it was dreadful, squadrons of planes, german ones, were going over about every 20 minutes, it went on nearly all night.

During this time the Royal Artillery had had anti-aircraft guns on the golf links at Stourbridge and one night their range finder was wrong, and we had shells falling in Belbroughton instead of hitting German planes and one fell on the house two doors below me, it smashed through the roof blowing most of it off, there was even pieces of shrapnel between their piano keys, it was a terrific bang. The A.R.P. came straight down, and they arranged for a tarpaulin to be brought from Bromsgrove and put over the roof. It was lucky no-one was killed. The miracle was, not one of the houses in the road had a broken window or any other damage, even though we are close together.

I worked in the offices of the goods department of the Great western railway at Hockley in Birmingham, it was a marshalling yard, the main one in the area. The Germans tried and tried to get us but each time they missed the yard. We had now and again a bomb on the lines but one morning when I got to the office we couldn鈥檛 work, the windows had all been blown out, we were very very lucky and so were the people of this district which was a very built up area, because hundreds would have been killed for when we looked across the road, there was an unexploded land mine straight through the roof of the pub, it went down into the cellar and out about three or four feet through the top, a massive thing.I can still see it to this day.

As regards food we managed with our rations and whatever we could get, occasionally we could get a tin of salmon or a tin of fruit which were in very short supply. My father grew our vegetables in the garden which was a great help, he worked on the Railway, and so did my husband who was in the Royal Engineers railway Operating company in this country. One other thing about bombs, one night when the German planes were returning from a raid, they dropped three bombs on Clent Hills to get rid of the weight and the force blew a little boy, an evacuee, out of the bath at the Foresters home in Clent. No-one was hurt.

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