Women of the Blitz
Over the past fourteen years, I have had the privilege of meeting hundreds of astonishing men and women who have been kind enough to share their wartime memories with me. When people ask me where I get the idea for characters and books from, it’s always from the wartime people I meet.
I’ve attended tea dances, coffee mornings, quiz nights, bingo and library reminiscing sessions, as well as conducting one-to-one interviews in elderly people’s always immaculate living rooms, and each time I leave feeling surprised and humbled.
The Blitz wrought unimaginable destruction but also bred great personal courage, strength, ingenuity and humour.
All of the people I’ve interviewed recalled with astonishing clarity their ‘Blitz story’.
When pieced together they make fascinating, and at times grimly humorous, reading.
Here are their Blitz stories, in their words.
Dolly
‘I was a tormenting bugger and always got a kick out of needling my older sister.
When the Blitz broke out, I was twenty and bored stiff of being cooped up underground in a stuffy Anderson shelter.
I wanted to be out dancing and having fun thank you very much, so being young and silly, I used to tease my sister something rotten, which drove her and my poor mum mad.
‘One night, during a raid, she fumed, “I’ve had enough of you” and stormed out to shelter underground at Columbia Market.
Unfortunately, it was the same night a 50kg bomb whistled down the ventilation shoot and exploded, killing fifty-eight people.
Fortunately, my sister survived, but Mum told me in no uncertain terms that had she died I’d have had her blood on my hands.
Needless to say, I kept my mouth shut after that.
‘As the war progressed, I got all sorts of jobs, from sewing army uniforms to making tyres for trucks to filling bombs and bullets with gunpowder. After that I was too tired to tease my sister.
‘Looking back, it’s us women who were the true heroes. It’s us who deserved the medals. Six years we toiled, while the bombs dropped around us, risking our lives, working and raising families while the home front was turned into a war zone.
‘My friend’s brother came home on leave during the Blitz. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t wait to go back into the army.’
Marie
‘I was evacuated from the East End but when my mother found out the woman I was staying with mistreated me she came and took me back to Stepney.
‘Even though we were bombed nightly I felt safer with her. We used to sleep under the railway arches. One night there was a terrible raid. There were that many planes you couldn’t put a pin between them.
Mum took me to shelter in our neighbour’s Anderson shelter.
I was buried alive for three days when a bomb dropped on a nearby railway siding, trapping us underground.
When we finally emerged into the smoky dawn, my neighbour, Mr Lather, calmly took off his leg and hopped off back to what was left of his house.
I was more terrified of that than the bomb.
I had no idea he had a false leg! Somehow, we survived.
Women and children were tough back then. ’
Minksy
‘Me and my sisters would sing harmonies underground during the Blitz to drown out the sound of the bombs. We were Bethnal Green’s answer to the Andrews Sisters.
I loved it when there were big parties, even weddings underground.
There would be conga lines snaking up the platform with everyone singing at the top of their lungs.
I learnt my trade in swagger and song during the Blitz. ’
Anne
‘I was born in Columbia Market buildings, a huge Victorian Gothic pile in Bethnal Green, which a friend of Charles Dickens, Angela Burdett, a renowned philanthropist, built to ease the East End housing crisis.
I loved growing up there. Me and my thirteen siblings used to play with dozens of other kids in a communal play area outside.
‘When the Blitz broke out, we used to shelter in the vast underground public shelter beneath our buildings and the community continued underground. There was great entertainment; singing, piano playing and so on.
‘On the first night of the Blitz, in a million-to-one chance, a bomb went down the ventilation shaft – or, as we called it, the apple chute – which led down to the basement shelter, killing and injuring many.
‘We were in the basement next door that night. I don’t remember much about it. Noise, confusion, smoke and screams, then my mum rushing me away. My elder brother went to help. He picked up a baby and it literally fell apart in his arms. Such shocking scenes.
‘The king and queen came round soon after to visit. He was in his army uniform and I remember thinking how pale he was. As the Blitz went on, we all used to discuss it and say things like, “Is the moon out tonight, we’ll cop it I shouldn’t wonder”.
We were very accepting of things and just got on with it. ’
Dorothea
‘The Blitz was chilling. I remember pushing my baby along Oxford Street in her pram when the alarms sounded.
That is a sound that makes your blood run cold!
Just for a split second, everyone stops and looks around, to see what everyone else is going to do.
And then you run. You just hope you will reach the safety of a shelter.
‘Anyway, as I said, the siren went, I stopped – just for a moment – and there was a man walking towards me. I didn’t know him, but everyone took concern for everybody in those days.
He looked at me with my pram and shouted, “Run and get your kiddies safe, I am right behind . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence because, at that precise moment, a bomb dropped in another street but the blast sent terrible shock waves right across where we were standing!
‘I heard a bang, a whoosh and a whistling sound, and instinctively ducked as the plate-glass window was blown out of the shop opposite. It missed me, went over the top of my pram and sliced the man horizontally in two! For a second, he remained upright in one piece, but as he fell the two halves of his body separated and then I couldn’t look any more.
‘I just ran all the way home in tears, oblivious of everything around me, and promptly got told off by my mother for not going to a shelter!’
Pat
‘How I used to love my job as a machinist at the Rego in Curtain Road, Bethnal Green. It wasn’t just a job; it was a rite of passage: Bethnal Green’s own finishing school.
All the girls singing in great lines, standing around giggling, smoking and plucking each other’s eyebrows on tea breaks. You’d never seen the like.
‘Then the bombs started. And everything changed.
‘One minute I was sitting at my workbench machining, then the next minute the entire front of the building blew off and just slid onto the pavement in a great cloud of dust. We were so shocked we sat staring at the passers-by in the street behind our machine.
‘During the war you never knew who would be there the next morning; quite often you’d come in to find empty seats where women had been killed or bombed out. They were very sad times, but despite this, by God we took the war on!’
Gladys
‘When the Blitz broke out, I was thirteen.
There was no adequate shelter in the East End, so civilians took over the Tubes.
What choice did they have? They were getting bombed night after night.
Not having a safe place was soul-destroying.
No one was trying to break the law, it was simply a case of do or die, self-preservation really.
‘To begin with, until it was properly fitted out, Bethnal Green Tube was hellish. Concrete, bare boards, cold; it was a building site really, and I was terrified. You had to start filing down the concrete steps from about four p.m., to mark your spot. But at least you couldn’t hear the bombs and the camaraderie was terrific.
Everyone laughing, joking, eating their dinners and singing.
On Sundays the Salvation Army used to come down and play music up and down the platform.
‘We caught everything going down there – scabies, head lice, you name it. You couldn’t take proper baths.
Occasionally we’d go to York Hall baths and pay sixpence for a bath.
You’d have an individual cubicle and shout “more hot water in number six” to the lady attendant.
Despite this, you were never really clean during the Blitz.
‘As the Blitz waged on, we tried more stations, from Liverpool Station right up to Oxford Circus. I must have slept on every platform on the Central Line!’
Dee
‘I wouldn’t have missed the Blitz for anything. Perhaps because I was young and full of spirit and youthful bravado, but it all felt like a great big adventure to me. I loved the camaraderie, the sense of us against them.
‘I was working as a typist in a city firm at the time. Every time the sirens went off, the boss would make us lug our typewriters down to the basement in case they got damaged during the raid. Great big heavy things they were. I didn’t want to get killed because I’d been looking after someone else’s office equipment, so one day during a raid I stood up to him and refused.
“It’s their typewriters, not ours,” I told the office girls in a great gesture of defiance.
He sacked me! That experience taught me to stand up for myself in life. ’
Dot
‘One shouldn’t laugh but there were some, albeit unintentional, funny moments during the Blitz. I was fourteen and working in a garment factory in Hackney, East London at the time.
‘Every night I sheltered in a huge basement under a school near my home in Bethnal Green. One evening, coming home from work, myself and a friend got caught short when the sirens went off so we dived into the nearest brick street shelter.