What a Birthday Present

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Three Counties Action on behalf of Lily Elizabeth Jones and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

It was the 3rd of September 1939, my 8th Birthday which I and many others spent filling sandbags. Life went on as normal. I went to “Alders Gate Street Ward School.”

I also went to the forge with my father. I used to pump the bellows to keep the fire going while he shoe-ed the big shire horses that pulled whitbreads drays. Mum worked in the city of London at a place called Hollywood. She was a first class seamstress also forelady over many other girls. When the war really got going she was turning blankets into overcoats, she was a gem.

“Next Step”, some bright spark had the children from my area evacuated to Falmouth, Cornwall, about 300 or more miles away from London. We all cried buckets.

Packed off with our little cases and gas masks to a land where no one spoke English, the Cornish and gas masks to a land where no one spoke English. The Cornish and the Cockney could not understand each other.

I know I was on a farm, that’s all I know till one night we got bombed. An incendry came through the roof and landed on my bed, luckily it never went off.

Meanwhile it was still quiet in London, so we were all sent back home. “Cor blimey I was happy” but not for long.

Then all hell broke loose. It started with daytime bombing and landmines that took out whole streets at a time.
“Don’t worry” said mum, “you never hear the one that hits you”, how true!

We lived in a block of flats next to de la rue’s in Duffering St, Finsbury. Just off City Road was the Royal Artillery Barracks.
We spent most of our time on the platforms of the underground, singing old songs. When the all clear came we would go and see if our homes were still there.

Then they started bombing us day and night, going to bed and having a bath “no change” you couldn’t tell one street from another. We made our way home, “what home” it was no longer there. Ass we knew and loved had gone, just a pile of bricks and dust.

We started taking cover in Whitbreads of cellars; we could not get out as both ends were on fire, all of London was on fire. There are no words to describe this.

We got rehoused to Baldwin Street. Dad got the blast from a bomb; he was in St. Batholomew’s Hospital. Two weeks later he past away, I was unconsolable.

The doodlebugs then started, we would watch them and pray the engine kept going as when it stopped they just fell from the sky, we got bombed out again.

“THEN THE V1, MY GOD” you never heard it coming, the sound came after it had exploded.

Friends of mum’s had moved to Dunstable. Come and stay with us they said. We had lost dad so we had no reason to stay in London.
“THANK GOD FOR DUNSTABLE.”

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