English Audio Request

This is the story of my life during the terrible times of World War 2. I was born in 1920 […] and I have so many vivid memories […].

I was 18 years old when war was being mentioned a lot […]. I worked in the City of London and travelled up every day from Streatham, where I lived, by rail to London Bridge and then by Underground to Old Street tube station.
I remember that beautiful sunny Sunday morning when war was declared as if it were yesterday. My Uncle was digging in the back garden ready to put the Anderson shelter up, we all went back into the house to listen to Mr Chamberlains’ speech on the radio […]. When not long after the warning siren went, we felt so vulnerable; we imagined planes coming over and bombs dropping […]

[The] factory [I worked in], in Old Street, was hit by a land mine in 1940 [and] completely razed to the ground. The company moved out to Oxted in Surrey […].

The dreadful raids continued and we were beginning to long for an undisturbed night and a good night’s sleep. [It was difficult to go to work], not able to go by train as stations had been bombed nor by bus as there would be unexploded bombs in the road. A lot of people, myself included, used to get lifts from whoever could take us […].

There were lots of times that I would arrive home after a day’s work and a horrendous journey and have to go to the shelter with my dinner in my hand. […] In the East End of London it was awful for families as they were being bombed mercilessly and […] queuing to get a place in the Underground […].

My husband and I met on the 23rd August 1940 […], just after […] the heavy bombing of London began. We used to go out to the cinema or a restaurant and have to dash home through a raid. We were stopped once by a policeman and made to go down the Public Shelter on Streatham Common. [We] could not leave until the “All Clear” sounded.

[…] More and more houses and shops, hospitals, factories, blocks of flats and other buildings were disappearing after the previous night’s raids. […] I used to see exhausted crews of the Rescue Service and the Fire Service and Civil Defence workers still trying to dig survivors, or bodies, out of the ruins of buildings that had been hit […].

One day, we had to rush to the shelter as there was a big raid on and we heard a bomb coming down. It was terrifying. All the girls, me included, dropped to the floor and covered our heads with our hands. […]. I learned later that there had been a direct hit on one of the shelters and a lot of office girls had been killed. […]

It was 1941 by now and I was engaged on my 21st birthday and married in July. [It was] a wartime wedding, we had a traditional ceremony, married in white, in Church […]. Family and friends rallied round, pooling coupons for food.

The raids went on and we built our lives around the constant danger. […] One evening we were standing at the front door, loads of incendiaries had been dropped and we had to try to put them out […] with a bucket of water […].

Amongst all these fires we saw what we thought was a parachutist coming down, […] and it was not until the Air Raid Warden came round that we learned that it was a landmine and that we had to be evacuated! […].

Meanwhile, life went on… we went to work, coped with all sorts of shortages, learnt to live with the horror that surrounded us, listening to the news and thinking about our poor boys, miles away from their loved ones and their homes, putting up with God knows what horrible conditions and privation, and thinking: “how dare we complain?”.