大象传媒

We lived in a council flat in Peckham in South-East London and we used to go an air-raid shelter round the corner. My husband lived in a house along the street - we weren't married then. We both got bombed out and had to live in the school for 10 weeks and then he moved into the flats as his house was too damaged.

One Sunday the air-raid siren hadn't gone but we knew there was a German bomber up above because we could tell by the sound of the engine. The German ones had a deep throbbing sound and ours had more of a flat sound.My brother and I were outside playing with a friend from next door and my mum told my friend and me to run round to the shelter and she and my brother would follow. and as we were running round, the siren went off. We could hear this whistling and when we looked up, we saw 3 bombs on their way down. One hit a house near us and it collapsed just like a pack of cards, and all the dust came up in a cloud. We had been taught to lie in the kerb with our knees under us if ever anything like this happened when we were out, so we did. One bomb fell just across the road but didn't fully explode so we just had bricks tumbling on us. Then we ran on a bit and we thought the side of fthe air-raid shelter had been hit because that was where it looked as if the other the bomb had landed, but it had missed it. We just ran back screaming that bombs were droppng on number 16 (that was the number of the air-raid shelter.) I was shocked and some girl came and carried me into a little chapel that was near-by. For some time after that I wouldn't go out or do anything because I was quite frightened. So my mother decided to send me away again from London.

In 1939, on the Friday before the war began, I had been evacuated to Somerset. The way it's sometimes shown on television was not the way it was where we went. We didn't stand in a group waiting to be chosen - we were collected as our names were called out so we must have been allocated to people before we arrived. Mum had said my brother and I had to stay together but the lady we should have gone to was on holiday, so we were separated. My brother was quite happy but I wasn't, perhaps because I was younger then he was, and I wanted to come home. I was 10 the week after I was evacuated. When I eventually came home, I didn't go to school for ages. It must have been nearly 2 years before I went back to school. A lot of the schools were being used for rescue centres and people who had been bombed out had to live in them, just as we did.

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