大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Sarah Cooper at the AGC Museum on behalf of Phyllis Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. Phyllis Smith understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in 1926 in North Kensington, London. When the war started I was still going to school and we reguarly had to practise the emergency drills. At the beginning nothing happened but when the bombing started it was very nasty as we Iived in a highly populated area. I lived with my Grandmother who refused to go outside to the Anderson shelter during the air raids so we all used to go to the basement of the 4 storey building. Luckily we were never hit as we would have been buried by the rubble! We did not have a bathroom so once a week we would take it in turns to have a bath in the large Galvanised tub in front of the fire.

After I left school I initially worked in a very nice department store. When I was about 15 I started war work at the Osram (Ozram) factory in Hammersmith where we made light bulbs and valves etc for aircraft. This was a very high building and during air raids we had no time to go anywhere so we all used to dive under our benches. Luckily the factory was never hit. We wore trousers and turbans, often with out long hair still in its curlers underneath! In the mornings on the way to work we would pass buildings which had lost their fronts, you could see all the cups etc still hanging on the walls. One morning we saw a land mine which had been dropped during the night hanging by its parachute from the church steeple.

Life did not stop just because we were at war and a very popular place to go in the evenings was Cricklewood to go skating. We would continue skating even during air raids and on the long walk home would dive into doorways when the sirens sounded.

After the war I moved to Lewisham were I got a job as a cashier and book keeper for 50 Shillings Taylors where I met my future husband. The end of the war was a nice relief - everything was nice after that!

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