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 Doreen Gardiner and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Doreen was 12 years old at the beginning of the war, her family lived in Coronation Avenue on Stoke Newington High Street. Doreen could have been evacuated with her brother and sister, but she didn鈥檛 want to, she preferred to stay at home with her mum and dad. She was the only child at home during the war.

She went to school at St Mary鈥檚 on Stoke Newington Church Street. The class was made up of 10 children of different ages who had not been evacuated, the teachers taught them all together in one class.

Stoke Newington was very badly bombed during the Blitz. The morning after a bombing raid, Doreen would have difficulties in finding her way to school because she had to pick her way through all the rubble and the bomb damaged buildings:

鈥淚t was hard finding your way because where you expected to see buildings there was nothing so you had to stop and think 鈥榮o where do I go now? No I鈥檒l have to stop and go all the way around and go up the next turning.鈥欌��

Doreen and her parents moved out of Coronation Avenue to Defoe Road. Six months later the block in which they had been living in took a direct hit from a bomb and over 100 people died when the basement in which they were sheltering collapsed.

However one night in Defoe Road a bomb landed just a few doors away from Doreen鈥檚 home. Her parents were in the Anderson shelter but Doreen never slept there, she preferred to stay indoors as she was not afraid of staying inside during the air raids. The bomb blast badly damaged their home but luckily Doreen escaped from harm. It blew a wardrobe over Doreen鈥檚 bed, and she was trapped underneath it until her father came in and pushed it off.

The bomb had damaged many homes on Defoe Road, leaving just a few houses and a church at either end. As their homes were no longer fit to live in, the bombing forced most of the residents of Defoe Road to move away. Doreen and her family had to move to another house in Stoke Newington, on Yoakley Road. However they did not escape the bombs as this home was also damaged when a doodlebug landed nearby. This time the damage was not so bad, some repairs were made and Doreen鈥檚 family carried on living in Yoakley Road through the rest of the war years.

When Doreen was 14 years old she left school and worked in a shop on Stoke Newington Church Street. Doreen was a dancer and when she was 16 she travelled all over the country with a dancing group until she turned 18 when she was called up to work. She worked in a factory on Northwold Road where she worked on a sewing machine, making parachute harnesses.

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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