大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Sue Smith on behalf of Mrs Joan Hicks [nee Brooking] and has been added to the site with her permission. Joan fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.
I was living with my parents in Western Ave. Portsmouth and working for the Civil Service in the dockyard. I must have been about 19 or 20. One evening we were relaxing in the front room and my father was preparing to listen to Winston Churchill鈥檚 broadcast, an event which he never missed. An air raid began and my mother and I hurried into the shelter but my father insisted on staying to listen to the broadcast, assuring my mother that he would come if things got worse. No sooner had we settled in than we heard a huge blast and realised that our house had been hit. We discovered that the debris was blocking our exit from the shelter and so had to wait to be dug out by neighbours before we could determine what had happened to my father. After an agonising wait we were freed from the shelter and saw that the back of our house had been demolished. Fearing the worst my mother climbed over the rubble into the house only to discover my father sitting under the dining room table clutching the cat under one arm and a bottle of beer under the other. Her anger that he had delayed coming into the shelter was only slightly appeased by the relief that he was still alive. The house took three months to rebuild and so we stayed with friends in Bishops Waltham during that time.

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