Brenda Evelyn BAILEY

I was nine years old when war broke out, and eleven when Plymouth was blitzed. I remember playing in the garden when there was a loud explosion and seeing the cloud of smoke and debris, and noticing particularly a chair amongst it as a time bomb exploded a few streets away. We would hurry down to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the long front garden when the siren went. I clutched my attache case of "valuables" - the only item I can remember of the contents was my precious tin of one hundred marbles, which I have to this day.

Sometimes the siren sounded too late for us to reach the shelter before the bombs started falling, and we would crouch, shivering with fear, under the stairs as bombs landed all around. My mother learned, with others, that if she had Radio Rentals on all the time she could receive early notice of an air raid alert as it went off the air a few minutes before the siren sounded. Sometimes my Mother cooked Sunday lunch in a biscuit tin - the sort grocers sold biscuits from in those days, with a glass lid - on the open fire, because the gas had been cut off.

We used to collect shrapnel on the way to school, and see when we arrived who had the most or the largest piece. We only went to school until 1 p.m. so that we would be home in good time before the night raids started. Arriving at school one day, the Headmistress called us all together - it was a private school of no more than twenty pupils - and told us that one of our friends and her mother had been killed in the previous night [1]. Her sister had been injured with a broken arm, while her brother and father had escaped unscathed. They had all been sheltering under the kitchen table when their house had received a direct hit. I can remember the tears in her eyes as she told us.

[1] My Mother was keeping a diary in 1941 and on Friday 21 March wrote "There has been another blitz and Audry Waterfield has been killed and her mother. ...". After 'normal' entries for 2 more days, my mother and grandmother went to Stoke Fleming. My mother then stayed with family friends in the village for about 3 weeks until her mother collected her on 10 April and they returned to Plymouth. However, after blitz on 2 consecutive nights, 21 and 22 April, they returned to Stoke Fleming. I don't believe my mother lived in Plymouth again after this; on 2 May my mother and her parents left for her grandparents in Boston.