大象传媒

When the war was declared in September 1939 1 was only one of the many children and adults enthusiastically filling up sandbags to place around our local East Sussex hospital in Hastings. Our family hair-dressing business and home was opposite the Hastings pier, our postal address was in St Leonards on Sea. And soon afterwards I was evacuated with my school, the Tower Road Central, to Bedford. I fell ill with scarlet fever in the first week and was put in the Fever hospital where I picked up Mumps. Within six weeks I was home again. My mother said if we were going to die it had better be together.

The hotels and every available boarding house on the seafront including the YMCA next door, were filled up to their attics with young RAF servicemen. We had no garden, no shelters to go in for safety during nightly air raids. The RAF Officer in charge kindly allowed my grandmother, my mother and me, as the only civilians now living on the sea front, to join them in the large car park under the seafront and made us welcome and comfortable with large mugs of cocoa and warm blankets. During this time we still kept our large hair- dressing business open, although it became increasingly difficult with German planes flying over the English Channel before we could get a warning siren. They flew over the town in broad daylight and sometimes machine gunned our Memorial and the streets. We had no anti-aircraft guns to help us. Our Spitfires came to the rescue whenever possible, and they did a victory roll over the sea front, if they shot down a Jerry. We had a German silk parachute put out on show in our White Rock pavilion for everyone to see.

Our Italian neighbour, Mr Divito from the ice-cream parlour next door used to run out, brave man, and shake his fists at the enemy planes. He lost a brother on a ship torpedoed by a German submarine. A German plane flew so low over our four-storey house one Sunday morning my mother and I
could see the pilot in the cockpit through our front bedroom window, and we hid under our bed. About then we'd heard that the long pipe along the seafront was filled with gasoline; they were prepared to set the sea on fire if we were invaded. The pier was wired and mined and the wooden boards were taken up.

Then there was Dunkirk and a large number of people were taken by train and coach to Somerset. We closed the shop and my mother and I stayed in Ilminster for a few months but missed home and came back again, to discover that Hastings was full of Canadians. Lord Haw Haw said in his propaganda radio programme that there had been a direct hit made on the Marina Flats, where the Canadians were billeted and many lives were lost. It was bombed but no one was killed, the Canadians were out on an
exercise. The spies we believed that they had in Hastings, had got it wrong.

My mother and I went to London, and the Yanks were here. Landmines were dropped on us willy-nilly, people slept in the London underground as usual, we slept in our garden shelter and then came the doodlebugs and rockets, and they were terrifying things. They just came without warning and hit people and places indiscriminately. I was old enough by then to do some war work and tested field telephones for the Services. Our Commandoes made raids frequently now in France, and one weekend
when we visited Hastings we thought we were being invaded and saw nurses and soldiers on the pebbled beach. They were bringing German prisoners ashore onto our beaches by the Hastings Pier, and the nurses from the local hospital came to take away the wounded.

D.Day arrived at last and I had put my name in a Picture Show magazine pen pal club. I started to get masses of letters from all over the world from America, even Haifa where that magazine had been sent or sold, but mostly from overseas servicemen. And I was just seventeen when I received a letter from my future husband. It was the twelfth letter that came through the door and my mother said, 'You can't possible answer any more.' And I said. 'I must answer this one.' He wrote 'Hello Pat' and told me that George Formby, one of the stars in battle dress, dropped into his dug-out in Normandy, played a tune on his banjo and gave him some film magazines. Ron said he picked out my name with a twig. (He did not have a pencil, and there was no such thing as a biro in those days). Letters followed letters daily, and all were censored before I got them. He was wounded. I didn't hear from him two weeks, till an army nurse posted a letter to me. I'd nearly lost him before we'd ever met. We met seven months later in February 1945 just after they gave Paris back to the French, and I saw him for the first time on a three day leave. Ron proposed to me immediately in his letter afterwards and we were engaged in June, booked the church in September and married on the 16th March 1946 after I'd only actually met him on three short leaves beforehand. . .This is my best memory of all I think.

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