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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Annie Keane of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on behalf of Terence Davies and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Our flats are a target
I was a year old when war started, we were living near London Bridge. The Elephant and Castle.

We were bombed in 1940, my mum listened to the radio and there was a chap William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. He originated from Camberwell and he used to say certain areas would get bombed that night. We were living in Queen’s Buildings and he said it was going to get bombed that night. We lived near Durances a factory which used to make lifts but had been turned over to making armaments so that was probably the real target.

My Mum said ‘We’re not staying here’ but my Dad was sure that we wouldn’t get hit. Anyway, we went down to Waterloo tube station, when we came back the next morning our house had been blasted. My sister had a porcelain doll, which was a heap of dust.

Evacuated as a family
Then we were evacuated to Shepshed, near Loughbrough in Leicestershire. My mum, my sister and me. My Dad was working at Battersea Power Station but he came to see us and met a friend from London and he said he was going for a job in a local industrial engineering firm so my Dad went with him and they both got a job. They worked on repairing Spitfires, Wellington Bombers when they’d been damaged on duty.

We were really lucky because the family was together. We came back to London to see the family there, I remember the air-raids.

I remember seeing two planes dog-fighting above us in Leicestershire.
My Dad used to take us out for walks, at the side of the roads were these corrugated huts where they used to store the shells, not primed but we used to run in and out of them when it was raining.

There was Italian Prisoners of War that used to get marched through the town. I remember the American servicemen who used to come to town, we always asked ‘Got any gum, chum?’

When we came back to London in 1946, we went back to a different flat in which had survived the bombing.

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