Ellen Doherty's Memoirs of WW2: The Mother-in-law

When war broke out I lived in Raven Hurst Street Birmingham, I was pregnant and evacuated to Stratford upon Avon, to a home called the Weaving School, when I started labour I was taken to the Hospital in Stratford. After the birth I went back to Birmingham worked for the BSA on munitions then I went to work for Singer munitions for a time then moved to Ludfords making Spitfire riveting the wings, Tail and Propellers together.

One night the Germans looking for the BSA bombed our house instead with oil bombs, a neighbour threw water over the oil instead of sand and spread the oil and the bombers saw this dropped an explosive bomb and made a direct hit on our house taking out five houses. Not long after I left the BSA the Germans bombed the BSA killing hundreds of people burring some alive. They could not get all the bodies out so they covered them over where the lay.

At dusk we had to keep to a strict black out, after work when we were at home the sirens would go off and we had to go to the shelters for up to four hours at a time. Sometimes we hid under the pantry. When I lived in Raven Hurst Street I lost 5 of my family in one house with a direct hit on their house, in the house their were two sisters who were pregnant and an uncle who was making a cup of tea in the kitchen when the bomb went off he was thrown right up the yard.

During the war my first husband took my to Norwich, right by the airfield. And when the German bombers came over the spitfires would take off and have dogfights overhead. Not long after I went to Norwich when the sirens went off I would wake my children up and go to the shelter, the neighbours saw this they would say why do you wake the children up and laughed at me. But when they had their first experience of bombs they stopped laughing.

One day down the garden an old lady was feeding her chickens when a German plain got through our fighters, and came down towards us firing his machine gun at us, I grabbed my two children and ran to the house, the old lady dropped down on to the ground and survived. Later one of our plains was shot up over Germany and the pilot managed to fly all the way back Briton and crashed just hundreds of feet away from the airfield and died not far from Kings Lin.

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