The Day they brought the soldiers home and The Day they machined us in the playground

May 1940 - Bristol - The Day they brought the soldiers home.

Word had got around that "they" were bringing the soldiers home. Not knowing who or why, nevertheless women and children flocked down to Stapleton Road Station, mainly bearing Union Jacks or favours left over from the Coronation, to cheer them on.
I shall never forget what I saw that day: train after train was pulling in and unloading soldiers onto the platform. The men were dirty, unshaven and desperately tired: most of the uniforms were tattered, some soldiers being helped along between two comrades, some on crutches, others wearing dirty blood-stained bandages.
Some were even doing their best to sing! Word got round that there were French and Belgian soldiers among them.
Despite the battle fatigue, the soldiers smiled and waved back and some threw coins to the children below. How we cheered those soldiers as they were transferred to buses, which took them to a hastily constructed camp in the local park. Here they were cleaned up, patched up and sent back to win the War!
Some long time afterwards, it seemed, we were told that these soldiers were of the last stage in The Evacuation of Dunkirk.

Summer 1940 - Bristol - The Day they machine-gunned us in the playground.

3pm. Friday. Break over and my class was in the bottom playground and engaged in team games: I was proudly wearing the cross bands of yellow team leader.
During the Battle of Britain it was not unusual for a stray German fighter to slip through our defences undetected. If we heard a 'plane, very few of us would have turned heads to look, so this one arrived unnoticed, because no siren had gone.
Suddenly there was the sound of a diving 'plane, accompanied by the chatter of machine-gun fire.
As a school, we must have been exceptionally well drilled in safety evacuation. There was no panic and we children simply divided into two groups, the first piled swiftly down the shelter, while my group fled for the arches under the school.
The German pilot managed to damage the very high wall of the playground, but no-one was hurt. Belatedly, the sirens went off.

Both excerpts from "Bristol Girl 1939 - 1945" by Doreen J Govan

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