Julia Draper, 89, of Chelsea in London, worked as a British Red Cross nurse during the Blitz at an army base in Camberley, Surrey.
One lived day to day. One didn't think of tomorrow until you got there. And, in the morning, we said: "Thank God we are here." I had just been married to my first husband whom I had met at a dance I had organised for the servicemen in 1939. He was a wonderful man called Frank Vogel who was one of President Eisenhower's aides at the British embassy. He was one of the influential men who were tasked to persuade the Americans into joining the war. He later died in a plane crash coming back from North Africa, where he had been sent by the president to meet General Mark Clark of the US forces in Rabat. During my time at Camberley, we were attacked on a couple of occasions. Thankfully, I was never near them. We maintained a courageous and resilient spirit to serve our country. And even as the times were trying, we tried to keep a semblance of normal life. We just got on with it. I even appeared in the Tatler . We had parties, pictures, theatre, plays. Sometimes young people met and had more romances in a carefree manner as no one knew what tomorrow held. We didn't always obey orders, but it was most important that we tried to. Still, we were better behaved than today's youth as we had a strict upbringing. In London, people were always fearful. When the Blitz ended, we said we could finally breathe. |
Len Phillips, 80, of Bloomsbury, London, sheltered at night in Holborn and the now defunct Museum Tube stations.When I go down Holborn Tube now I always look at the platform and think "I used to sleep here of a night". There were quite a few hundred people there, with the passengers stepping over you because it was still being used as an Underground station.
When the siren went, we used to go down and wait for a tram. We would stand at the tram stop and see the searchlights. The trams did make a lot of noise. You felt safe in the tram. I don't know why. It would rattle around and we'd go down to Holborn and get out and go down to the Tube station. It was cold and there was always the fear that if they burst a water main we might get flooded. They were the early days, so the spirit was quite good. We got on fairly well together and mucked in together. Once the Museum station had been made habitable, we went down there. The lift shaft was the washing facilities and toilets. If the bombs were dropping, you could hear the bombs echo down the lift shaft. People did various things. The kids used to play. There was a photo of me putting up Christmas decorations where we had the bunks. I think we had a little party at the end of the platform that one year. It probably would have been Christmas Day. It wasn't long after that I was evacuated. I was getting very fragile round the edges. I kept thinking: "Is it ever going to end?" That's what I think it was: "Are we ever going to get out of this somehow?" And, of course, we did. It was one of those things we had to put up with. John Gent, 78, a retired London Transport worker, was an eight-year-old living in South Norwood, London, in 1940. By the end of the year, Croydon had experienced 399 air raids. We would all sit knitting squares to make into quilts for the troops and Merchant Navy. As the bombing worsened, we took to going to bed in the shelter and spending the whole night there. My grandparents lived in Peckham and Mother invited them to spend a weekend with us in our shelter. While they were with us, a bomb fell near their home and rendered it uninhabitable. As a result, their weekend visit lasted for the rest of their lives, until Grandma died in 1946 and Grandpa in 1957. One evening a friend and I were in my garden when I remarked on the really beautiful sunset. The bright red sky was due to the fires in Docklands. It was a spectacular and memorable sight. That night was one of the worst of the Blitz. One day we heard that a bomb had destroyed the home of a classmate, Derek Barnes. His mother, father and baby sister were killed. Our class clubbed together to buy him a Meccano set. To this day I can see him standing forlornly as he received his gift and said goodbye to us, presumably to start a new life with relatives. |