Original subtitles

Open your right eye.

And close it.

Very gently lower your right leg to the floor.

I'm 101.

That isn't bad, is it?

Do you ever talk about what it was like?

to be a child during the Blitz?

No, one doesn't.

It opens up far too many horrors and crevices

in one's earlier life.

So why talk about it now?

Because everybody's asking, because they realise that we're the last.

elements of the generation that went through the war.

So few of us are left.

We're all popping our clogs quite frequently.

Do you think we're right to ask questions?

Well, if you learn from them, yes.

It might have been better to be evacuated. There was always this feeling

something was going to happen.

I had no idea the war was coming. It would affect us so much and be so very,

very scary.

People who have not experienced it can never comprehend how bad it was.

I think it's important to remember.

To remember the horror of it.

The Blitz continues to live inside me.

You don't just get over it.

You carry the consequences with you forever.

Hello?

Hello?

Now, listen, this is not dementia that's making me do all these. I am personally

like this.

I'm 90 and a half.

Don't forget the half.

The main problem of dementia is part of your brain

knocks off.

But the part of my brain that I need is still.

With me.

And that's what I'm giving to you.

We heard a lot

about Hitler. We knew that he was an evil man.

My sister, who was younger than me, was afraid the Germans were going to invade

the country and eat her.

We were all so patriotic.

It was England and we weren't going to let anybody take it away.

The only war we could imagine was French warfare.

What our fathers had gone through.

People mentioned air raids.

And my father, God bless him, don't worry, he said, we've got big, strong

on our roof.

That was the mentality.

We didn't have a clue about air power.

I don't want her to leave.

I want to keep her with me.

And that's what she done.

She looked after me till she couldn't look after me no more.

As far as I know, it was never even mentioned because I knew nothing about

It would have been nice, especially if they'd sent me to a farmer somewhere

that. That would have been really nice.

I would have hated it, I think. About half the school were evacuated.

The rest of us went to the station to wave them off on the train.

My mother and father said, if we're going to die, we're going to die

You will now hear a statement by the Prime Minister.

I have to tell you now, this country is at war with Germany.

I could feel this fear in the adults.

The way they talked to each other was... A little bit... I wouldn't say snappy,

but there was a distance between them at times that they were trying to reason

what was happening.

And of course you couldn't, because every day was different and it was the

of the unknown all the time. They never knew what was going to happen next.

I was really worried about war.

I think children are very sensitive.

They... Pick up fillings, even if they don't quite understand them.

Now, may God bless you all, for it is evil things that we shall be fighting

against. Brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression,

and persecution.

I was born in 1931 in November and we moved to Croydon, near Croydon

Aerodrome. We lived in a council house. It was beautiful.

We loved it.

This is my parents. I should think when they got engaged.

My father was born in Ireland. My mother was the daughter of an Italian

immigrant. And she looks Italian, doesn't she?

Very unbecoming clothes, weren't they?

Every Sunday evening, we used to have what was called the circle.

Everybody did something.

So the uncles would sing, mum would play the piano, my grandmother sang

beautifully.

If you're Irish and if you're Italian, you are very, very prone to talking and

discussing.

The complication in our family was that my grandfather was Italian and Mussolini

was the one who began fascism.

I knew that we weren't like that.

And if Germany came over, be that Mussolini, we would be controlled.

We would be told what to think and what to do.

And I've never wanted to know what to do or what to think.

We just knew it was coming, just knew.

I think everybody knew it was coming.

We had blackout curtains, everybody had to have those.

Every little chink of light had to be obliterated at night.

Oh goodness, you had to be so careful.

People used to light cigarettes, one from another one, with

their hands clasped over it in case the glow showed.

I don't light dark now, and I never have light dark nights.

Whether it's something to do with that, I don't know.

I do not like being out after dark.

Official information and instruction will be given over the wireless and in

newspapers.

If you are provided with a steel shelter and have not erected it, do so at once.

The Anderson shelters are like a noble shelter.

And then at the front where the door is, there was...

Corrugated iron.

It was earth up to half the way. Yes. On the top. And we had books there.

Yeah, we had books. It was quite cosy, really. They had a door, just one door,

nothing else. In front of the door, there was a barrier made by corrugated

It was very strong.

And that was the sort of framework.

It didn't, because there was soil.

Yeah. Put on halfway up. But the corrugated iron was also at the front,

you had a door. It wasn't doing you any good.

I remember the sticking out, because do you remember I fell and damaged my ear?

When I fell, it was like fins sticking out of the concrete.

When you hear the sirens or anti -aircraft guns, you must get under cover

once. But the most important rule of all is never to stand staring at the sky.

Have you ever heard an airway siren?

Whining, a whining sound.

Loud, you couldn't miss it.

And a call shiver used to go through you.

I can hear it, but I can't reproduce it.

I know exactly what it sounded like.

But for some reason, I don't want to remember it.

My body doesn't want to be reminded.

It went... Yeah.

You know, it's really frightening.

It's just in my brain.

You had to get up as quickly as you could, leave everything, and down the

stairs.

We had an air raid shelter in the garden.

I used to be responsible for the animals in the family.

We had two dogs.

Peter, he was a fox terrier.

Bimbo, we had another one called Bimbo.

Cat, we had a cat.

We had a budgerigar who was taken in his cage.

We called him Django.

I don't know why.

Because our wee houses didn't have a garden either front or back, we had

to go.

We just had under the stairs where the gas meter was.

We could have been gassed.

We used the cupboard under the stairs. We just got in there in the dark. I

thought it was a queer joke to begin with.

It was nice because Mummy would cuddle me and we would play spoons and we would

talk to each other. I told Mummy not to be upset because my daddy would chase

the bad noises away.

The thing I remember first is seeing the fire raid on the docks.

We saw the red glow in the sky.

We saw a German plane drop something. My younger brother thought it was a

chocolate box, but it must have been a bomb.

And when the bomb started being dropped in Croydon, we heard this absolutely

weird sound. I can't describe it. It's a bit like a wind, but

a very dull sound.

And then the explosion.

So I knew by then that they could explode and destroy houses.

The Blitz was not confined to London.

I hope people realise that it was countrywide.

It's very annoying to everybody else in the country that London is always

thought to be the be -all and end -all of everything.

It isn't.

It absolutely isn't.

When anybody mentions the war, I think of Coventry, of course.

I don't think of London, I think of Coventry and my experiences.

I was born not very far away from the Alvis factory, where they were making

kinds of things for the war.

Coventry was a lovely old medieval city.

It was a very close -knit community.

Nobody, for instance, locked their doors.

Nobody had a television. I'd never even heard of television.

Mum was an extraordinary woman.

She would put me to bed and then she would sit with me.

And I'd heard all these bumps, you know, which were the bombs, of course.

But she never gave me any idea that she might be frightened at all. She made a

game out of the whole thing.

I had no idea what the bumps were until...

There was a house on the corner with a low brick wall and I could see over that

low brick wall and in the garden they got a chicken run.

And I used to love going and looking at the baby chicks.

So this one morning I went to see the baby chicks and there was basically just

pile of rubble.

And I stood staring at this pile of rubble.

And I said to my mum, well, where are the baby chicks?

And she didn't pull any punches. She said, they're dead, love.

They're under the rubble.

It didn't occur to me until years later that people lived in that house that

they must have died.

I'm a Hull boy. I was born in Hull and not far from where I'm living now.

Hull was quite a good -looking city in its finest days.

My father was working for the Prudential Insurance Company.

I came a little bit late in Mum's life. I think she was 29 when she had me, so

that was... probably a little bit late but they were very loving parents and i

was very well looked after

ho is very much a working

class area the doctors were quite

tough guys but they were nice guys as a little boy i would love going to

victoria pier and you'd be able to see ships going in and out of the docks.

One night, the sirens went off.

My mother said, we're going into the air raid shelter. We just got out onto the

terrace at the back of the house, and suddenly this whole sky exploded.

The searchlights were pinning up into the sky and picking out the raiders and

the bombers.

And with that, then the anti -aircraft guns went off.

There'd been sparks flying all over. It was like fire one night.

And suddenly a hand went under my bottom, and a few seconds later I was in

air raid shelter.

It was like living in hell.

But first of all, they were in front of me, and then they moved around to the

right -hand side of me, and then to the back of me, and then to the left of me.

We thought, any minute it's going to be our turn.

And it went on.

So I'm told for six hours.

We'd had this horrendous night.

But dawn came.

It was my grandma's morning off that she would have, and she would go into the

town.

My grandma was a very powerful woman. She didn't make five foot.

Hitler was not going to stop her going into the town.

And so she got me ready.

When we got to the end of Beverley Road, to Blundell's Corner, it was the most

horrendous sight that you would ever wish to see.

Virtually all the buildings were down. There was smoke, rubble across

everywhere. There were people searching for survivors.

There were fire engines, police cars, ambulances.

We had to stride over all these hostpacks, but we kept on walking.

On that corner was Fields Cafe.

This is where Grandma and I aimed for, and we got to.

And we'd gone through all this devastation, and the cafe was open. You

believe it.

In the window was a coffee machine, and it ground coffee.

And when you came to this area here, you could smell the coffee beans.

This cafe also had people playing music in this as well.

And you think, where did they come from?

After all this devastation that's around us, life went on.

When it was in our own city, we thought we were the only people being attacked,

but it wasn't that at all.

Would you like me to make coffee or tea for the flask? Tea, I think.

Tea. Shall I put the milk in?

Yeah, you need to make it in the teapot, it'll be easier.

Yeah. Put two teapots in.

Yeah.

There was a saying in Yorkshire where you shut up and get on with it.

These days people talk about caring and loving and being together.

That never happened in those days.

I think you just had to look after number one as best you could, even when

were little.

Where we lived, it was a very small house and there were eight of us living

there. And the toilet was across the big courtyard at the back and that was

shared, I think, between six houses.

All the local kids were out in the street every day and the babies in the

even as well sometimes.

Because the mothers used to put the kids outside and I suppose have a little bit

of peace and quiet.

I was the youngest of six children.

I was a spoiled little brat, so they said.

I once threw myself into a grave in the cemetery. There was an open grave that

was ready for somebody to be buried in. And to get my sisters into trouble, I

told my mother that they'd push me in.

That's the kind of child I was.

My father worked at the tram sheds.

I know he did something where they walked round the streets and they were

checking that everything was all right.

They were called ARP, I think.

ARP will enable timely warning to be given of hostile aircraft.

Public shelters to be met.

Steelworks made ammunition.

So I suppose the Germans were thinking, if they blasted the steelworks and

finished those, then they couldn't make ammunition.

And where we lived was not far from the steelworks.

My sister was about

14.

She wanted to go out and she'd got stockings on and she thought she was

dressed up, I suppose.

And I can remember looking up at her and thinking, oh dear, she's getting

herself all fancied up to go out.

And then the sirens went and my mother wouldn't let her go and there was a bit

of an argument.

I can remember thinking, oh, I hope she doesn't let her go.

Just to be nasty, I think.

When the all clear went in the morning, everything was just devastated.

My mother would have got me dressed and ready, and then my sister -in -law must

have taken me with her.

We walked from Pitsmore to Infirmary Road.

I can remember my sister -in -law saying, oh, look, that's gone.

That's gone. Well, they're not there anymore.

I'm just feeling like this is what happens.

This is the way life is.

It was nearly lunchtime, so of course I was thinking, I wonder what we're going

to get for lunch today.

I had no idea what was going to happen next.

The last road I remember we went up was called Fowler Street and we'd gone about

just a few yards. I can remember the exact spot.

This man came up to us and said, don't go up there because a woman's just been

killed by a bomb.

I thought, my mum's up there, it could be her.

This is it here.

This spot here is a common grave and it's where my mother was placed

after she was killed.

And I think it's so sad that nobody cared enough to give her a proper

grave and a proper burial.

There was a time bomb which went off while she was hanging and washing out.

There was a lady next door to us, Mrs Bluff.

She sat me down on the chair and she'd just made a... It must have been two or

three dozen jam and lemon tarts.

And she kept saying, have a tart, have a tart.

And I just sat there on this dining chair. I didn't want anything.

I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to speak.

I didn't want anybody to talk to me. I wanted to be left alone with my own

thoughts.

I knew my mother had got killed, but I was in a state of total confusion.

Well, there was a different attitude then.

Our thoughts were held in our brains and stayed there.

You didn't tell anyone what you felt.

I don't know who would have listened.

I was constantly being told children should be seen, not heard.

I can only remember sitting on my mum's knee once.

I don't think I was unusual.

Looking back, I don't recognise that I needed to have love and support

and so on.

It's only now, thinking about it, perhaps it would have been a good thing

had had it.

What number was your hand?

63, I know it well now.

There we are.

Oh, things have changed.

The street, as you see down there, would have been straight all the way through

the terraced houses.

And I'll show you now where our house was.

Yes.

Near enough, this spot here would have been our house, number 63, Jubilee

Street.

I was very, very, very poor.

Don't remember you having a nice shirt or a nice thing. You had a really bad,

bad necessity.

It really was.

I remember even at 10 years of age, a couple of the lads may have hired a

truck from a little shop at the end of the street, Mr French, and you'd borrow

that truck to go walk them out to buy your coal.

Coal fires for warmth.

My father came home on leave.

After a cup of tea, he said, come on, he said, while I'm home for the evening,

I'll take you to the cinema.

And I'll always remember the night. It was a George Formby film, and it was

called It's in the Air.

It's in the air This funny feeling everywhere

That makes me sing without a care today as I go on my way. And within ten

minutes, whoops, the lights went on.

Up on the screen, there is an air raid going on. Please go as soon as possible

out to the rear doors.

But when we went out, my dad said, people were coming out backwards, and he

said, right, jump in the car.

He drove away from the cinema.

Through Cardiff, and bombs were dropping as we were going past the Cardiff

Castle. He said, I'm going, where he knew all his sisters and brothers lived

Port Talbot.

The next day, we drove back into Cardiff, and, oh, my mother burst out in

There is half the street crumbling. Our house crumbles in pieces.

The crater was a big, round area, deep, deep, and all the houses demolished.

People were killed.

Two children and an adult got killed.

My father, he got out of the car and joined the AR people up amongst our

and he brought two items out there, which I'll never forget in all my life.

One was a baby, a little bit of a hornbill set that he had bought for

ready for me.

And a two -pound bag of sugar, which I think he won from the army.

If he'd gone home or not gone to the cinema at night and we would have been

underneath that stairs, I wouldn't be talking to you tonight.

Luck? Absolutely.

Lucky, lucky.

Lucky, lucky.

It was a time of great deprivation, but you just shrugged and got on with it.

This was the way we had to meet the Germans.

Is it the apple in it that

makes it so lovely?

Food was in terribly short supply. You have no idea

the stuff we all ate.

Just to keep alive.

My mother always said, you eat every scrap of food on that

plate. There's some poor sailor risking his life to bring you that

food.

And I used to think of this poor sailor and I didn't really want to eat what he

brought in.

Food was all on coupons.

Milk was delivered by horse and cart with John and Maude Briggs.

Yeah. We were brought up to get on with it. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Yeah, we just had to, we didn't, you know, like they do now, go on and on

and on. And if I'd done something I shouldn't have done.

I'd get slippery.

Yeah, because you was a little monkey when you were young, weren't you? You

to get hit more than I did, didn't you, in those days? Because you used to go

out with Michael Tomlinson, didn't you? We didn't do malicious things.

There were all these dead cartridge cases, loads of them, and we started

them up, joined them all together and put them around our necks like a status

symbol. It was always out, messing about.

When you heard the...

It's an air raid warden. Quick, quick, quick, run into your shelter and wait

the all clear.

When you got up in the morning, there was a smell of dust.

And you knew that that meant there were houses near you that had collapsed.

You would see evidence of bombs that had done damage, but you saw the damage,

but you wouldn't look.

When two of my best friends, Jean and Ernest, received a direct hit, they were

the first two people.

that I knew had been killed.

And they were dead.

I'd never see them again.

And it was that that hit.

That was the moment I realised it was real and that people weren't playing

at war.

Nobody took it terribly seriously in Northern Ireland.

We felt we were too far away. Our government felt we were too far away.

didn't bother building anything much in the way of defence.

When Cloudbank in Scotland was bombed, our government began to realise that

Belfast could be bombed next.

I'm very, very proud that I'm from Belfast.

I wouldn't change it for the world.

My house was in a terrace.

Seven houses.

I've never classed 13 as an unlucky number, even after what happened there.

I was an only child.

This is me from when I was a year old.

That must have been my party dress.

And this is me with my wee sailor boy.

And I loved him.

My daddy took me down the Shaggle Road and taught me

to do the tap dancing.

I was on the stage at five -year -old.

And this is my daddy.

Here.

They were the resident band in the Rinka.

I was just a happy little girl.

Loved everybody and everything.

Never in a million years did we think...

that our town was going to be bombed.

I was born in Ajax Street, Cakedale.

Grew up there.

People were...

Always short of money, but they were honest people.

My father worked on ship repairs.

He worked as a blacksmith striker.

He could walk ten minutes from where we lived and it was just ship repairs, ship

repairs, ship repairs.

A hive of activity.

It was the busiest part.

There was a feature in Liverpool in those days called the overhead railway.

Now, you got on one end of South Liverpool and you ran along

overlooking the docks, I think eight miles.

I used to love it, just going along on the overhead railway.

The British planes mostly had Merlin engines, which were sweet sounding

compared to the rough German ones. The Germans seemed to go in a

droney noise.

In other words, like a bouncy one, whereas the other was a clear

sound.

Once it started, it was quite noisy.

The whistle used to be not very good to hear.

And when you heard the whistle, you knew they were close.

You know, that screeching sound they made.

I would imagine that Cynthia and I possibly cried.

We would cry sometimes because we'd be worried, wouldn't we? No, I don't think

so. I remember the most significant thing. If you said, what do you remember

during the war?

It's that.

Teeth chattering, you couldn't do anything about it.

The night of May the 3rd, 1941, was one of the worst nights of my life.

I spent that night with the family in an Anderson shelter in my sister's back

garden. I was sitting there.

We clenched fists.

So you just felt it was coming.

This was the time.

Once the bombs were released, they were screeching at you. They screamed at you.

I just felt very, very safe in my mum's arms until she didn't feel safe and she

started crying.

But she kept comforting me, kept her arms around me and telling me, you know,

would be all right, it would be over soon, which it wasn't. It just went on

on and on.

Everything was so intense and every explosion was so near.

I honestly think most of us did not think we were going to survive that

I honestly think that.

When the house shook, Mum had said to me, I think we must have been hit.

And she opened the door and very, very gently put the light on. And she said, I

don't believe it. It's perfectly all right. It hasn't changed.

God help anybody who's in the middle of that, who has been hurt, who has been

bombed.

We heard the noise, the noise on the roof.

The noise came in.

from the roof and right down to where we were.

And the noise was horrific.

And then everything was on fire.

It must have been horrific for my mum trying to get me out.

It came down on me.

Not on me, but it may as well have.

I don't even know where we went. I don't know what happened.

I just probably realised that that would have been the end of my dancing.

We spent hours, I can't remember how long, in the shelter.

When we eventually...

I heard the all -clear sound.

I remember coming out the shelter, my younger sister by my hand,

looking at what used to be familiar sights, Thompson's

shop, Sunderland's, and they'd completely disappeared.

I was put into my push chair and pushed down the Newton Arch Road and it was

horrendous.

Absolutely devastating.

The houses were sliced into two.

They just looked like doll's houses. People were trying to collect bits and

pieces of their belongings which had been destroyed.

It suddenly struck me, those people have got nowhere.

Just nowhere.

Oh, you could not explain it.

And obviously you're walking through rubble, there's no clean streets or

like that, everything was just rubble.

And we walked where Jessica Street used to be, gone.

Hermey Street, gone.

Chaos.

After May the 3rd, none of those seats existed.

Half of our school went to the same school as me.

They were all my schoolmates.

Just never seen them anymore.

And I couldn't even number the dead.

Good God, there must have been a lot now.

It was the end.

of our community the end of it was my life my childhood

had gone friends gone

For years after the war, I couldn't speak.

It was... And I couldn't speak.

Nothing would come out.

There's a wee thing that I do with a certain type of cloth.

I have to have these wee bits of cloth, and they have to be a certain thing, and

it makes like a wee...

says when you're doing it. I think I started doing it on the pillowcase after

we were blitzed.

That's one of my labels.

I just remembered I had that in my pocket. One of my pockets has one of

it and I do that with that and I tap the... Have that going to bed?

Now I'm 90 years of age.

Imagine saying that to anybody outside.

Don't be telling anybody that.

What does that say under Greg Gavin?

In brackets?

Word of down. Word of down.

I just can't believe I'm going down here.

After the bomb went off in our house, the

government had said to my mum that

I would have to go away for safekeeping.

And that was to Portadown. My mum took me down to the

station with my case.

So this was the first.

a paver was leaving my mum and dad to go to

a place that I didn't even know.

This has stuck in my mind, this Brownstown Road, and it's funny that,

stuck in your mind. It's not.

Do you think it's the trauma?

I know.

It's just I've always remembered it.

But it was a row of...

Now there's a school.

Garden houses.

You see there's a row of houses.

Yeah. There would have been something like that.

And these houses here would be from before that era. They would have been

There before that era.

This definitely resembles the place.

Now you're doing your scissor. Are your nerves going?

It's on my trousers.

I didn't know these people who were older than my mum and

dad.

And to be put in there with just an elderly woman and man,

they didn't really know what... to do with the child.

I couldn't speak to them, slept with them, wet the bed and that didn't go

too well with two elderly people.

I was just so unhappy from a

child who was a happy little girl.

You know, when I was going to bed at night, we had to say our prayers,

on my knees at the side of the bed.

Father God, I just hope you keep my mum and dad safe.

And I just wish they were here.

And I hope the bombing stops and the war will be over.

Like I hope the people are happy here

What's

it the top off all right, oh my goodness what's going on

Oh, you're not winning again, are you?

I only knew wartime when I was a boy. I had no recollection what peacetime was

like. It was just a normal way of life for me.

An incendiary bomb fell right in front of the house and it exploded.

So we moved to 163 Beverly Road. It happened to be a doctor's house.

I would spend many hours just looking at what was happening on the main road in

front of me.

People did come with arms bandaged up or an arm missing or a hand missing, you

know, all these awful things that would happen. But a child's understanding

isn't a grown -up's understanding of what's happened. I just thought the

-ups were unhappy.

My father, he had to go off to...

North Africa, to Tripoli. He left my mum pregnant.

And so mum was left on her own. And then Susan was born.

Sadly, she was born with a heart defect.

But she looked perfect to me.

She was a beautiful little child.

She was a little blondie. She was a little Bobby Dash.

I was all the time linking with adults.

And suddenly someone of roughly my age came on the scene. She relied on me for

everything. Wherever I went in the house, she was there with me.

Whether I went to the loo or wherever, she was there.

And we played cowboys and Indians.

She thought it was wonderful.

And she laughed so much. I used to get into trouble. My mum used to say, please

don't make her laugh so much. You know, you'll make her ill.

Yeah.

Very touching times, those.

I've seen these before.

I can't believe you've got all these.

Oh, it's about moving those cups, do you think?

I think it looks only... I think it looks untidy. Oh, OK.

That's you?

That's me, yeah.

When my mother died, no -one reported a death.

I don't remember having a funeral, even.

My dad left as soon as he found out that my mother had died.

And nobody knew where he was.

So he was way out of the picture.

So there was absolutely nobody to turn to.

Even relatives, I don't remember.

My mother had a sister.

They were very close, apparently.

But I don't even remember her coming to see us.

And then I was adopted.

Yeah, that's Harry, my adoptive father.

And I think that must be his brothers.

They look like gangsters.

Yeah, they do, don't they?

I wish men dressed like that now, you know. Yeah. I'd love it.

Oh, my goodness.

Frances Smith. Yeah.

Parents. She was doing the Pirates of Penzance.

Because she used to have a concert party at the church.

She's the woman who adopted me after my mother died.

She went to social services because her and her husband had no children.

And they knew there was a lot of children made homeless in the Blitz.

So they adopted me.

Did they live in Sheffield? Yes, they did. They lived at Hillsborough.

Hillsborough. Did you get spoiled? Oh, yeah.

Oh, you look quite happy on that. Oh, I was, yeah.

I got a proper little coat on.

It's not been worn by five other people.

It's had a velvet collar, I can remember it.

Look at your hair.

Yeah. Curly hair. Yeah.

They lived a proper life.

What I thought was a proper life.

That I didn't know existed before I went to live with them.

And it was like being taken out from living under a bucket and

then put into somewhere nice, into the sunshine.

She was such a kind person and she was just so happy to have me for her little

girl.

But unfortunately that didn't last very long.

Frances wanted to take me to the seaside because I'd never been.

And they had a friend who had a farm near Grimsby.

And the doctor told Frances, because she had asthma very bad, he said, don't go

to the seaside because she wouldn't have been able to breathe.

And we'd only been there from Saturday till Tuesday and she died Tuesday night,

overnight.

and I was in the bedroom on a little clamp bed.

I was totally heartbroken.

I think worse than when my birth mother died.

It stays with you every day of your life, I think.

about how you were and how people tried to manage.

But me, as a little girl, I can imagine thinking, I don't know what's going to

happen to me now.

The daytime raids were in many ways the most frightening.

I remember my father and I were walking back from a neighbour's shelter where

we'd been.

We heard this plane come over and it came low and it was fighting, sending

machine gun bullets as hard as it could.

Dad threw me on the ground and lay on top of me.

I actually saw the man, the pilot.

I realised then that this wasn't a personal thing.

They weren't looking for people to kill who they knew or knew could be

important.

It was part of war.

This is one of the things that I have kept since the war, because this was in

the upstairs bedroom when the plane machine -gunned us.

The bullets ricocheted off the statue that was in my brother's bedroom and

that mark.

This statue has always remained

valued, I would say loved,

ever since.

I was only a child and I really felt this had been...

what had kept my brother safe.

It was hard, but one was so proud of what we were

doing. People were selfless in those days, but there's

always a rotter.

There's a rotten apple in every barrel.

I had five miles to go to school.

I started off going by train, and the railway line got bombed.

So I used to get a bus.

Then the roads were bombed, and my father bought me a bicycle,

and that was stolen one day.

I was told to leave my bicycle and get down into the air raid

shelter. When I came out, my bicycle had gone.

And the very thought that anybody would be so selfish,

couldn't imagine anybody doing such a hateful thing.

And so I had to walk five miles to school till I got another one.

And when people's homes were robbed, you despised the people

who would steal from somebody whose house had been bombed.

I lived on the Thames near Hampton Court Palace and the Germans used

to come in and just follow the Thames up and they bombed it night after

night after night and you could smell the smoke from London.

They were determined to get London and obliterate it.

The next day we got on our bicycles to go and look at the fire

and we cycled for miles and we suddenly realized that it was

further away.

but so intense, so very bright, that we hadn't realized

how far we were cycling.

I can still see us on our bicycles, school kids, trying

to cycle to look at the fire and not realizing it was so many

miles away.

It's an abiding.

Memory I have.

I have only to think about it and there it is, London burning.

My mother was always looking for letters to come back from her father.

And he was asking about me and my sister and how Mum was and everything.

Because he'd been away three and a half years.

It looks as if they were communicating every week to each other and the

situation in Hull was very bad because of the blitz.

And so there was this understanding that anything could happen at any time to

any one of us.

I didn't know much about this letter, and my mother revealed it to me.

A letter to Susan, and it would be on her first birthday.

This is the first letter I've had the pleasure of writing to you.

And just fancy it is your birthday.

In 20 years' time, you will be 21.

So when you have read this letter... Put it away so that we can read it on your

21st birthday.

Susan was growing up and then tragedy happened.

I was sleeping with her in the same bedroom. I heard these very strange

coming from a cot.

And when I went to the cot, it was not an eyesight.

She was having like a convulsion of some form that I didn't understand.

Her mouth was frothing and her arms were flying around all over.

And so I went very quickly down to my mum and told her that they flew

And then she said, stand there.

Don't move. Keep with Susan. I'll go and ring up next door. We need the doctor.

Soon as he saw Susan, he said, it's a hospital for her.

My mum held my hand all the way down.

I think she knew what was going to happen.

Susan had died.

So that was a very massive change then.

And then we had the funeral, and I was the only child there.

My grandma held my hand all the time.

You know, all the fun we'd had together, those thoughts.

No laughter, no fun.

Suddenly she wasn't there.

I tell her I love her every day and I miss her.

I do it every day.

Life did change after that.

I went into a quiet mode.

I didn't speak, I could speak perfectly well, but I just didn't.

Very difficult time.

You had to keep, had to keep everything going.

You could not add to the unhappiness of your parents, who were already worried

about you and about the war.

In those days, you took on a lot of responsibility when you were young.

When the bomb fell in our garden, it didn't explode, but you could still feel

the shuddering sound in the shelter.

Then the bomb disposal people came. It was them who told us we had to leave

within three hours.

The idea was...

that when the bomb was defused, we could go back.

But it blew up, killing the man who was doing it.

When we got down to Patcham and I started seeing the downs, suddenly

changed.

I didn't feel frightened anymore.

I determined to climb all the downs.

It was, I want to cry now, but it was crying at the pleasure

of not having to be in London another night.

I didn't look back on my life at all. That was it.

It had ended. The house had gone.

I wasn't going back there.

And that's when I pushed everything underground and never thought about it

again.

At four o 'clock this morning, Hitler attacked and invaded Russia.

The Germans, maintaining heavy pressure against the Soviets, have won successes

in the north and south.

Aircraft squadrons have been moved from the west in anticipation of a Soviet

offensive.

They've been shot down in large numbers.

Here's the scene in a Moscow square where they've been putting war trophies

exhibition to the public.

German bombers, aircraft which may have themselves raided the capital only a few

nights before.

And German incendiary bombs, now as familiar to many Soviet cities as they

to us.

We did have a radio, and so the grown -ups around me would be always listening

to the news of the day.

I was a child with limited knowledge, but I did realise there was this massive

change and that we started then to take the war back to Europe.

From the west, from the south, from the east, the war -making potential of

Germany will be bettered until the job is done.

Shouldn't we have bombed German cities in the way we did to total destruction?

I don't know.

It was even worse than Hull, if you can say that, and that was bad enough.

All we thought served them bloody right.

We had no sympathy for them.

Said aloud,

the Nazis to take over their country and bomb the hell out of us.

Why should we feel sorry for them?

Well, they've brought it on themselves.

We've been through it. Now it's your turn.

I was 14 when Dresden was bombed.

You could not think about what we were doing in Germany because if you did...

He would have gone mad.

But there were people who were pleased to see the eye for an eye and the tooth

for a tooth sort of thing.

Well, we got to.

We just can't let them punch us and beat us like Joe Shaw.

We got to. Good Mr.

Churchill.

Thank goodness, Mr. Churchill.

We got to.

I wasn't aware at all for years what we had done to Germany.

I was horrified because I thought the people who'd done that to us

were disgusting people.

I didn't think we were disgusting.

It's very sad that people think the only answer is...

to do what's happened to us, only even more so to the other chap.

Towards the end of the war, a plane threw over Belfast and we were all out

playing in the street and there was immediate other planes going to shoot it

down. And a man fell out of the plane and a parachute came and I

started to cry.

And mummy asked me what in heaven's name I was crying about.

And I said, that's somebody's daddy.

And that's something that's said with me.

No matter who the enemy is, it's probably somebody's daddy, somebody

I have a photograph of my father with a pram and I was in the

pram.

That was the only real time I had with my father.

As the war came to a close, I know my father in the

Royal Artillery.

went across to Europe just after D -Day.

And he fought all the way through France, Belgium and Holland and into

Two weeks before Hitler committed suicide, my father was ambushed and he

killed.

And the telegram arrived.

I remember the screams from my mother and my grandparents.

And I ran from the house.

I couldn't stand the noise.

And I ran.

I just lay on the grass of that church.

I didn't go back for hours.

It was awful.

The country where...

Joyful and celebrating.

And we were saddened. My family had lost all.

And I never saw my father again.

I think I would have been a better person had he been around.

Because I've been very much an introverted character because of that.

It's important for me to come here and say, please remember my father.

Because he gave his life for you.

I came through World War II and I survived it.

My mum came down and picked me up and brought me home.

It

was

just like heaven.

I just loved her so much and missed her so much.

my dad I was so so so

happy to see my own bed even though it was all charred with the

burning people did think

that I was mentally retarded because I couldn't speak

It was there to come out, but it wouldn't come.

We had a shop at the bottom of our street.

The daughter of the shop was serving me and I couldn't get it out.

And she started to laugh and make fun of me.

And I ran out of the shop crying.

And my mummy went straight over.

She said, don't you ever laugh.

I have my child again.

That is an illness from this war.

Even when I was married, I mean, I still was quite bad

with the stammer.

My girls would have talked for me and my husband.

I wouldn't even have answered the phone.

What did you feel like? Like, what emotion did you feel like?

Very bad. Very sad.

And then it was the centenary of the First World War.

And I got up that first time to the children in the school.

And I was able to say, good morning, class.

And I couldn't believe it.

So I went with my wee case.

There's the children.

There.

with their wee parcels. And that just helped me that I could say that without

stammering to them.

It was very lonely being away from your mum and dad.

I wet the bed because of the bomb coming in.

Oh, right, right.

Right, you're right.

I was eight years of age when I used to walk down this street.

It never leaves you.

Because of my house being bombed, relations of mine gave us a home for

years.

And them relations were very, very kind, God bless them.

Excellent.

Absolutely. That's why I'm here today.

It's come to the fact now that I'm well over 90 years of age, and I'm helping

other people.

Hello, people.

You're early again, aren't you?

Thank you very much.

Thank you. For 10 years now, I've been wholeheartedly giving them a few hours.

Oh, my gosh. Watch it for dinner, and I'll slide them out your way.

I know what it feels like to be...

Lost.

Where are we going to sleep tonight?

Where's the next meal coming from?

Right, sir.

What would you like this morning?

Steve, would you help this gentleman with his cup?

I do serve him nice cups of tea and coffee. That makes the best tea in

Be careful, no?

I'm doing something.

helping somebody, and I'm still healthy enough to do it.

Touch wood.

Right, everybody.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Come on, it's your eye, like a big piece of pie, that's

amore.

Scorsese me, but you see, back in old Napoli, that's amore.

That's amore.

We're working on the spine now.

Yes, if you want to, hang on to your knees.

People had more to their lives than just money, money,

money, which seems to be the be -all and end -all of everybody's

lives these days.

People...

don't seem to have the standards which we had, altruism.

We were all committed to getting rid of Nazism from the

earth, really, because they were so wicked, these people.

But what comes next, I do not know.

We went through that war.

And for years afterwards, everything was hopeful, looking towards the future,

building, inventing things.

But now I look at the television news and it fills me with horror.

When you've lived through a world war and the end of your life, you're really

scared about what your grandchildren are going to go through.

It's so important to remember because it wouldn't take much

for us to be there again.

So many people had their lives turned upside down by the war.

I think I thought that that was just the way life was going to be for me.

When I became a mother for the first time, I really felt like I was somebody,

and I belonged to somebody, and somebody belonged to me.

You've got something to love and nurture.

I think I am who I am today because of the blitz.

The horrible things that happened.

made one realise you can't give in.

You must deal with it.

Don't feel sorry for yourself.

Just carry on fighting.

You know that you're going to die before too long.

It's the way life is.

It ends sometimes, doesn't it? Like everything else, it comes to an end.

What can you expect when you're 90?

Especially having dementia.

It's going to get worse. I know it's going to get worse.

The family knows that it's going to get worse.

I just have to live each day as it comes.

And be thankful that I've had another day.

without you.

Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll.

Let me put my arms about you.

I could never live without you.

Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll.

If you ever leave me, how my heart will break.

Oh.