“...I was a hairdresser in a very big department store, in Portsmouth...I’d been with them three years, serving an apprentiship. My apprentiship finished on the saturday and on the sunday war was declared. I had offered my services to the Civil Defence, and the police rang me monday morning. I was just going to start as a fully fledged hairdresser...they said ‘You’ve got to come down to the Guildhall and report...
“It was the following summer that they started bombing us, during the day...I was to answer telephones...there were ARP wardens dotted all over the city. When they dropped the bombs they had to ring through...(to report) you know, electricity down, gas leaking, people dying...We took these messages, handed them over to another group who phoned the emergency services. I was a plotter as well for a while, but they found I was better on the phones. “...My brother-in-law was in the airforce and they’d put him in charge of a balloon unit, in Gosport. Somehow they knewthere was going to be a really bad raid on Portsmouth and he managed to get across...He came rushing in...he went up stairs to look...it was an old five storey georgian town house. Luckily my farther had turned the cellar into an air raid shelter...(my brother-in-law) rushed down the stairs and said ‘Get all the windows open, they’re coming...’ "They dropped so many bombs and we were right by the dockyard... he was just going to turn off the mains gas when they dropped the biggest bomb...It hit the lemonade factory, totally desroying it. They destroyed the house in the grounds next to it, all that was left was the biggest crater. The blast, we caught it fully and that was it. Our house...it wasn’t totally destroyed, but you couldn’t live in it...It had a beautiful spiral staircase, it was hanging of the walls, you couldn’t even get upsrairs. We were horrified, huddled together...We had this little dog. I had my hands over his ears..the noise was unbelievable. You just can’t describe it. You could hear the bombs coming one after the other, and they got closer and louder and then this one...we were covered in dust, we couldn’t see each other...the air was thick with dust. “They had the ministry down to look at this hole. It demolished the whole of the square practiacally...All the people sitting down having lunch, they were all killed. We couldn’t find their bodies, they’d gone to dust. “...I packed a few things and went and stayed at the Guildhall..I lived on Smith’s crisps and cups of tea for about a week. That was the summer (1940)... “In the winter (January 1941) they bombed the Guildhall. I had the night off (and) we were watching a raid, watching Portsmouth burning...My dad wouldn’t let me go in...I know it was a bad raid because my boyfriend rang me. He said ‘We’ve been in an underground shelter...We thought we’d had our day and when we came out we didn’t even know where we were’. I said ‘How did you ring me’. He said ‘I was walking down Elm Grove and I saw lying on top of this heap with all the brickwork was the telephone kiosk...He said ‘I’m sitting on a pile of rubble here... “I went down the next day...I don’t know how I got there. I walked over burning rubble, there was nowhere you could go and even get a cup of tea...They openned a new civil defense centre in Portsmouth, but I’d had enough...I went and joined the Land Army for a bit of peace. I went to Winchester, milking cows... "I finished up engineering at Southampton...I was terrified going back into the raids again...I’m sure it was the cause of my deafness...” |