Sheila Mary Phoebe Finn Campeau

It was terrible, terrible. Bombings and then we had the V2s [ the German V2-rocket, a ballistic missile], I think they are, the proper word, but we all called them the doodlebugs. And that was a flying missile with nobody in it. And it would fly and then it would stop and it was really a bomb. And when it stopped, you knew you were for it because down it came. It was a very very scary time. And I was in a certain part of Croydon [a town in South London] and suddenly, there was an awful noises and the siren went off, we hadn’t really experienced anything very much up until then. And then we saw the planes and we saw the bombs falling out of them. And that was terrible. There’s an airport in Croydon where I was living and they were bombing the airport and they killed an awful lot of people, it was a terrible experience. We had a very old house with a big cellar, so people, friends of my mother, would come and we’d sleep there at night because it was sort of safe. But I always hated it and I wouldn’t go down there. And my mother was always very bothered about that. But one night, I went up to bed and I stood there looking out of the window, waiting to see if I could hear anything and I don’t know, I had a funny feeling, so I decided I’d go down to the basement. And I went down and a house up the road was bombed and 12 people were killed in it. And glass was all over the bed where I would have been sleeping. But I was fine. So that was a rather shaky experience too. And then we’d have those Molotov cocktails that spin and they spit out fire and they’d drop those so they’d land in people’s houses or anywhere. I remember when the Germans came and they dropped in the garden and I got the washing out bowl and I dug the dirt up and I shook it all over the fire to kill them. But it was not a nice experience for a young teenager really. You know, you’d hear the siren going on and off all day long. But London wasn’t as badly bombed as where I actually lived, which was 10 miles south of London. And we got a lot more there, we got all the doodlebugs and everything. We were so short of food and clothing, it was a very very difficult time. You knew the noise when the bombers were coming over, you knew the sound of the engines and you could always tell if they were theirs or ours, you know. And they had a funny throbby sort of noise, so you always knew, but when it was the doodlebugs, they in turn had another noise and you knew what that was. That was terrifying because the minute the noise stopped, the bomb dropped. And it was very scary when it was right overhead or something. I’d forgotten some of these things, it’s horrible. Oh well, people did get fed up but I never went into a great big shelter. There were big shelters in the underground in London but I never went in those. But I understand that they all hard quite a cheery time. You know, they’d sing songs and have meals, make sandwiches. But I never went in one of those.