We went back to the house with my friend. We were the posh ones because we still had a bit of railing in front. The whole of the ceiling rose in the front room had come down. There was another blast. If you could imagine a big bowl of rice, lift up the rice and let it run inside the jar, that’s incendiaries coming down, hundreds of them at a time. A couple of sailors picked us up and carried us to what was left of the front window to see the flames and said: you will never see a sight like this again. The whole of Devonport was ablaze.
She just sat at her piano and played, my mum, and would not go into any shelter or protect herself. Once there was a blast and she ended up with Venetian blinds all around her. Oh, she did look funny! There was muck all over the piano, and she was still playing away. Dad wouldn’t come in the shelter either, he’d stay roaming around the house while she played, ready with his tongs to throw out bombs when they came in.
A blind couple lived next door to us. They went down in the air raid shelter with us and when we got up next morning their house was gone. Later the blind woman said: ‘I can still smell it now, the stuff from all the fires and all the rubble, an awful stale smell, like burnt hair, vermin, mice, fleas. All that’. When a house is hit by a bomb, it releases a peculiar smell. It’s like its life has gone. It’s a smell that I have never forgotten.
The Germans scored a direct hit on the oil tanks at Turnchapel. One bomb fell in our garden. We had a fishpond, and the next morning the windows were all blown in and the fish were dead, scattered all over the garden with all sorts of old cable reel, all odd bits and pieces. Going back into the house, I hated it. I was afraid there was a German there, waiting for me.
I could hear the planes up there, the bombs were coming down, this sailor threw himself over me to protect me, and then I lost my new hat. You could see the aircraft, the search lights on the aircraft and the ack-ack guns having a go at them, like the gun was right beside you. The whining whistle of the bombs coming down, and then the shuddering, and us holding each other. Howl dogfights in the sky everyone pray, I was hanging on to my brothers and sisters like stones.
All the men at Pottery Quay were running in and out of our houses and passing buckets full of water down the passage, to go and put the fire out across the road. The tides used to be so high, the spring tide, the water come right in our front room and there was two big swans swimming in the front room who’d come in with the tide.
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Melisande Fitzsimons
After Eileen Organ, Vera Evans, Michael Turpitt, Val MacLeod, Sheila Allen, Sheila Soroka, Peter Amey, Maggie Daniels, Susan Wills, Fred Brimacombe, Desmond Robinson, Colin Baser, Arthur Rugg, Barry Woon, Mr Ward, Mrs Hancock, Angela Watts, with thanks.
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