大象传媒

Violet Osborne鈥檚 Blitz memories.

I was just 7 when the war started. My story happened in 1940.
In our house, my mum had made a cage of very strong wire called a Morrison cage, around the table that my grandfather had made, just in case we were at the house when an air raid warning went off.

I was sitting outside my house door on the pavement, as we did in those days, when the air raid siren started. My mum called us in. We were getting ready to go down to the air raid shelter, but gran said that we shouldn鈥檛 go down there, so we all went under grandfather鈥檚 table. All my grandmother sang was 鈥淎bide with me鈥�.
First of all everything went quiet and then suddenly we heard this terrible bang on the table, and my mother said 鈥淲e鈥檝e been hit.鈥� We were all crying, under the table. The table was covered with rubble from the house, and all around the table there we were blocked in. Mum told us to be quiet so that we could hear if anyone was there. It was so noisy. We were bombed in 1940. The buildings in front of us were bombed and the buildings fell onto our house and flattened the house, except for the front which stayed standing. All of the inside was destroyed. All of us children were crying and it seemed so long before we heard anyone. After what seemed such a long time we heard some one shouting 鈥淚s there anybody there?鈥� and my mum shouted back that we were all there and to bloody well get us out quick. It seemed hours before we were out of the place.

When we finally got out and saw the devastation in the road. The houses over the road just weren鈥檛 there. It was awful especially seeing friends being brought out really badly injured or even dead. It was dreadful.
The air raid shelter down the road was completely destroyed and the people in there hadn鈥檛 stood a chance.
We were taken to a rest centre where we were given clothes and bedding and we were allocated to a place in the rest centre as ours. We set up our bedding and the table came with us. She promised to keep it in our part of the room. All the time the bombs were falling all around us. The table had saved us, and my mum insisted on taking the table out of the rubble and we kept that table for when we set up a new place.

We鈥檇 moved four or five times during the war, each time getting bombed out. Then we moved to Parnell Road, and the air raid siren went and we all went under the table again. We heard a knocking on the door during the raid, it happened three times, and my mum said she had to answer the door. She thought it was the air raid warden checking to see if everybody was all right. She opened the door and she saw an incendary bomb that was bouncing backwards and forwards across the road each time hitting our door. She could not understand how it had happened because incendiaries usually exploded straight away. There were dents in the door where it had hit the door. The bomb landed on the edge of a water but and my mum watched it fall into the water and burn itself out. We were so lucky that the bomb had not exploded on us. We were really lucky because there were bombs going off all around us all of the time. People were killed just sitting in their own homes.

I didn鈥檛 have much schooling because as soon as we started to work the siren would go and we would be in the shelters just singing.
On one occasion we had to get out of the house and we were watching the planes fighting overhead, and the whole of the sky was filled with red 鈥� London was alight and we were walking on debris, not pavements. We just had to get on with things.

We were so lucky. We used to go down into the underground and sing to the people there. It was Manor House station the station that was hit directly and was just sealed off because there were so many people down there when it happened. I might have been in there. So many times we were so lucky because places we may have been were bombed out and destroyed.

My mother was remarkable during the war. She kept us together and was marvellous. In the end we were evacuated except for my younger brother. My mother became so worried about us. I was a bit of a rebel and was very naughty causing other people problems. I really wanted to be with my mum. I went to Lyme Regis, Ely and Elmswell with my brother and sister.

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