´óÏó´«Ã½

I was living at no 28 Levett Gardens in Ilford, Essex, and had just started school when the war broke out. I went to school with a knapsack and a label attached to a brown button in case we had to be evacuated. We also had to take a change of clothing and a picnic meal.

In our garden, we had an Anderson shelter. My parents slept on bunks. I had my own bed. We even had meals in the dugout. There was an electric light and a pot boiler so we could make tea. Once things started to happen, we slept there.

I then changed schools. We attended either in the morning or afternoon but not for the whole day. It was South Park School. When there was an air raid, we would all sing ‘One man went to mow’,

On one occasion, we were in bed and mother threw herself on top of me because planes were going overhead. We weren’t as badly bombed as Newham. When I was 8, our road was bombed Father came home from work, and tried to come down our road which was closed off. A policeman told him nobody was living there. He replied that he was living there. He took the policeman to see that we were living in a dugout.

There was a landmine in the next road and a rocket in our road. If you could hear the rockets, you were OK. At my uncle’s house, we heard a rocket and the kettle jumped off the hob. Wardens came to each bungalow to check that everyone was OK. Some miracles happened to people. One woman had gone down the dugout to say goodnight to her daughter. It saved her life because a rocket had fallen on their house.

On one occasion I saw a house with the outside wall blown away but you could still see. bed still inside. Father was an ARP and a fire warden as well. He’d been a soldier in the First World War. He had enlisted underage but grandmother got him out.

V1 buzz bombs. If you heard them coming, you got under cover. If the engine stopped, you waited for the crash. With the V2s we didn’t know when they were coming. They even took barrage balloons down. Life wasn’t so exciting after the war.

When we were down the dugout one afternoon the ‘All clear’ sounded but there was a thunder storm. I have always associated chipolata sausages and thunder with the war. We were frying as they sounded the ‘All clear’.

When I went to school in the morning and we heard V1s and V2s I felt that if I wasn’t killed, then perhaps my mother would be killed while out shopping and father might have been killed in Romford, or our house could have been destroyed while all of us were out

When I was 5 or 6, in 1940 or 41, there had been a landmine in the next road which was Parkway. Our windows were blown out. I lost my toy soldiers and mother wouldn’t let me retrieve them. In the front room, the leaded windows had curled into a ball. I wondered what might have happened had I been there. I came to a realisation of death. That is when I began to speak to God. I prayed that neither my family nor I would be killed and we remained safe.
Sister Enid Mary Cocker. FMM

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.