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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Wendy Wood of Hastings Community Learning Centre, a volunteer from Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Southern Counties Radio on behalf of Joyce Thatcher and has been added to the site with his/her permission. Joyce Thatcher fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

It was in 1940 that my friend Jean Jones and I had gone to the shops just to have a look round and while we were walking home an air raid siren sounded. This is the first time I remember the awful sound. We knew what it meant — bombs could be dropping on us at any minute but for some reason we didn’t feel scared. There was a public shelter near us and someone came out and pulled us into it and refused to let us go till the all clear sounded. We were more concerned that our mums didn’t know where we were and that they would tell us off when we got home for being too long

Year 1942

My family moved to Deptford. One school day without warning there was a raid. The boys and girls had separate entrances/exists to the school and our house backed onto the school. My sister and I got home safely but my brother coming across the playground, heard a loud noise and looked up to see a German aeroplane coming down Evelyn Street — he could clearly see the pilot. He was saved by the air raid wardens pulling him into their shelter
The pilot was machine gunning the children coming out of the Evelyn Street school and then dropped a bomb on the pub (possibly called the Chichester) on the corner of Windmill Lane. Everyone in the pub was killed apart from a pet monkey that used to sit on a upstairs window sill, and the two year old brother of a school friend who lived next door to the pub also perished. I was terrified all through the war apart from the rare occasions when we were evacuated to the country.

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