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 Terrence Mahoney and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Terrence was born in 1937. His first memory of the war was when coming out of an air raid shelter to find that his family鈥檚 home in Kent Street, Haggerston had been completely destroyed by a bomb. Terrence remembers his mum crying because she thought that her older children might have been in the home at the time (although luckily it turned out that they were safe).

The family had been in a shelter that stood in the street. It was two bricks thick with a concrete roof and there were bunks around the wall. There were normally 60 to 70 people in the shelter at any one time.

The family then moved to Holms Street. After having been bombed out in Kent Street Terrence鈥檚 mother refused to go in the shelter; she said 鈥渢hey take my home they take me with it!鈥�

Four years later Terrence鈥檚 home was hit again. This time a doodlebug hit the gas works nearby:

鈥淭here was a bomb site in front of us, then a row of houses, then the gas works. Now because there was a gap there we got the blast. It went through the gap and hit our house and next door, shattered all the windows frames in, in the room and took half the roof off and cracked the walls up badly.鈥�

The blast caused the window frames fly into the bedroom where Terrence and his brother were sleeping. Whenever an air raid warning went off Terrence鈥檚 brother would roll himself up into ball with the blankets and pillows on top of him, and that saved him from being killed. Terrence and his brother were trapped in the room because the blast had blown a wardrobe across the door. Their father put his weight behind the door and managed to get them out. Terrence and his family stayed in the house after some temporary repairs were made (they put tarpaulin over the house) and lived there until 1949. The street was eventually cleared to make way for Haggerston Park.

Terrence went to school in Scawfell Street; there was a lot of blast damage to Weymouth Terrace. Once, he came out of the shelter to find everything bombed, including the school. He was not upset because he grew up with the bombs and it was a normal way of life to him. The children played on bomb-damaged sites where they built caves and houses; they also played football in the streets.

It was during the war that Terrence found out that he was going blind. He had inherited a congenital disease from his father who was also blind. Terry started having problems with his eyes when he was evacuated to Swanley in Kent, and during a visit to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London the doctors discovered that he would eventually lose his sight. His parents had seven children but Terrence was the only one it was passed on to.

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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