A man was peering through the window...

We were living in Dover before the war. I lived with my parents but I was already working as an actress. I sang and acted in musical comedy.

After the ‘phoney war’, when the shelling started; Dover was under attack and we had to have a pass to go up into the town just to go shopping.

One day the house opposite was hit and our own house was shaken so badly that the plaster was cracked and flaking. Father and I were in the kitchen, it was a half-basement, making a cup of tea. (Some people used to go and shelter in some caves under the cliff but we weren’t about to do that.) Mother was worried about the house so she went up to the ground floor to take a look.

She was rather annoyed to see a man peering in through the windows, so she opened the front door and said “Well, if you really want to see what’s going on then you’d better come and take a look inside!” He came in and they got talking and she realised that she really hadn’t taken against him. So she asked if he would like to come down to the kitchen and take a cup of tea. My father had the newspaper open on the kitchen table. His eyes went from the paper to the man and back again. Our visitor was Winston Churchill. He was not yet Prime Minister and had come down to the coast to take over from the 1st Lord of the Admiralty. Mother just hadn’t realised who the visitor was.

There was to be a sequel to this some years later.

This story was collected by Jill Hollands and submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the BBC Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Molly Cresswell and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See another of Molly's stories:

• “Turn back! You’re only 2 ½ miles from enemy lines”

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