My War Experiences - by Pamela Hewett

In 1939, when the war started, we children lived in a four storey house at number 1 Claire Rd., Forest Gate. Apart from my mother and father there were my brothers George who was 13 yrs old, John was ll yrs, and Sid was 9. I was 7, my sisters were Dolly aged 3, Eileen aged 1, and my youngest brother was born in May 1939.  My father would not let us be evacuated at the outbreak of war, and we still went to school at the beginning, but when the bombing started I went to lessons in a house. My dad was an air raid warden and after the bombing became more frequent and intense we used to go down to the cellar, we did not mind as we had a wind-up gramophone with piles of records to listen to. When our Anderson Shelter was built dad said we had to go down into it for safety. We had bunk beds and a Paraffin Stove to boil the kettle on for tea. I was never frightened. I used to collect shrapnel (exploded bomb and mine fragments); it was hot when you picked it up. After our house was hit we had to be dug out of the shelter.

We moved to Oakhurst Rd for a short time then on to Fowler Rd. The Germans were trying to bomb the railway line and we lived just opposite. When the opposite side of the road got bombed to the ground, they laid all the bodies along the pavement, it was a very sad and frightening sight.

At this time the German Air Force was sending bomber aircraft over regularly, and they started using VI rocket propelled bombs which we called Doodlebugs because of the way they looked and sounded, after a time they invented the V2s which were an advanced model