London in the Blitz

The following is an excerpt from a group reminiscence session held at Ashford Library on 3/11/05. It is added to the site with the participants' permission.

In 1940, the proper war started, the Blitz. We lived in a very old house and it had a cellar, and my father had that cleared out, and he had a kitchen made, and bedrooms sectioned off, and so on. And we spent nearly every night down there, for months. But it was quite comfortable.

I lived in the Tottenham Court Road, and it was really in the thick of it, and we could see the docks burning, and all around it was rather bad. Nobody got any sleep, but I was a young teenager, it was great fun, where I was concerned. There wasn’t an awful lot of damage, but we lost our windows, and then we had it all bandaged up. It wasn’t awful — but it was because I was at that age that it was excitement, great excitement.

We used to go to the pictures, of course, and you’d be sitting there, watching a nice film, and suddenly the screen would come up ‘An air raid’s been sounded’, leave if you wanted, but most of the people sat there and finished watching the film. By this time I was wearing make-up and anything that a teenager wanted went into the gas mask — you don’t want to carry two things, so you used it as a handbag, and everything was shoved into this little box.

My first job was with a glass manufacturer’s in Essex, there were two of us in one room and windows at the back. When the doodlebugs started coming over, we heard a whistle, and we dived underneath our desk. Fortunately they were two really tough old, big old desks, and we went up under there. Of course our legs stuck out, all the glass blew out and for weeks afterwards we could feel pricking in our legs. The First Aid had taken out as much glass as they could, but there were little splinters, and for weeks we’d say, “I’ve got a prick just there”, and they’d come along with tweezers and just pull them out.

We had no street parties or anything, it wasn’t the sort of place to have street parties, but on VE Day we went down to Trafalgar Square, and people were throwing themselves in the water, in the fountains, climbing the lamp posts and so on.

Memories contributed by Albina Braysher and collected by Ashford Library Local Studies Service.

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