A rat on the pillow

This story was submitted to the People’s War web site by Karen Elmes at the Building Exploratory on behalf of Rachel Tomkins and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Rae lived with her family above their shop in Vartry Road, just off the Seven Sisters Road in North London. As there was no garden they did not have an Anderson shelter. There was a shelter on a piece of empty ground nearby but they found it very flimsy and did not take shelter there during air raids. Instead Rae and her family would go to her grandmother’s shelter in Chelsea. Rae’s grandmother ran a huge greengrocers and had a large shelter in the basement. They had bunks put down there and quite a few people used to use the shelter.

Every night, when Rae’s parents shut their shop, they would catch a number 11 bus down to Chelsea and the safety of the basement. One night when she was on her bunk in the basement, Rae had a bit of a shock:

“I opened my eyes and there was a rat on the pillow! I just got up and I went upstairs to what they call the shop parlour and I said to my grandmother ‘I refuse to go down there any more!’ She was a very staid, Victorian lady — ‘you’ve got to come down’, I said ‘no way, if I’m going to get killed I’m going to get killed up here!’ And I never did go back down there, but I was lucky, soon after that I got called up.”

This story was recorded by the Building Exploratory as part of a World War Two reminiscence project called “Memory Blitz”. To find out more please go to http://www.brickfields.org.uk/^{About links}

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