大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War web site by Karen Elmes at the Building Exploratory on behalf of Pat Hoover and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Pat and her family lived in Bethnal Green near the Museum of Childhood on Cambridge Heath Road. Pat was evacuated to Weston-Super-Mare at the beginning of the war. She wasn鈥檛 evacuated for long because her parents wanted the children back.

The house Pat lived in overlooked part of the museum gardens. When there were air raids Pat and her family used to take shelter in one of two shelters there were in these gardens. Pat recalls that one night a doodlebug hit the side of the other shelter to the one Pat was in. She remembers it being a terrifying experience, and many people were killed. She recalls the Air Raid Warden telling them to move on because they were trying to get people out.

Pat鈥檚 home got badly bombed during the war, and they lost all their belongings. The authorities put the family in a school, and then moved them to Stepney Green in a nice new home, where they spent the rest of the war. Pat remembers her walk to school through bombed out streets.

This story was recorded by the Building Exploratory as part of a World War Two reminiscence project called Memory Blitz. To find out more please go to ^{About links}

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