Janet Neale
Recollections of the heavy air raids on the Home Front.
'It was a norm'
Born in 1935, Janet was living with her family in Sidcup at the outbreak of war in 1939. Living with the family was also Janet’s grandmother who had left her home in Guernsey when it became clear that war was approaching.
The area suffered heavy air raids and Janet recalls how sheltering became part of everyday life:
‘I think it was all a bit of adventure, really... [I]t was a norm. That’s where you went to bed. So as I say a child...doesn’t question. I don’t think they do. I say I was only...just over nine when the...war finished. I think, perhaps, it affected my brother a bit more because he was a bit older’.
'The sixty-first hit us'
In the latter part of the war the family’s home was damaged by a V1 rocket:
‘Oh, it was horrendous...around here. The noise, you know, because of...the anti-aircraft guns. All the houses across the road were all flattened and...it was very bad around here. And then when the...V1’s started...the house next door we had that was practically demolished... The night of the V1’s my mother counted sixty stopped over the house and the sixty-first hit us.’
'I suppose it was shock, she got out of the shelter and she was' going, ‘Oh, my roses, my roses!’ All the vases were broken, all her roses were all over the floor.'
One particular moment of the night that the family’s house was bombed remains clear in Janet’s memory:
‘I remember when this V1 hit the house, my mother had, next door had a fantastic garden full or roses and she picked all the roses the night before and had them in vases all over the place and she, I suppose it was shock, she got out of the shelter and she was going, ‘Oh, my roses, my roses!’ All the vases were broken, all her roses were all over the floor. I remember that as clear as anything, her saying, ‘My roses, my roses!’
Following the raid
The bomb damaged the house and only one room was left without major damage. During the raid Janet sustained injury: ‘I was excited by all this, got out from the indoor shelter, hit my toe on the indoor shelter and then I developed tuberculosis in the bones of my foot through that injury’. To recuperate Janet was sent with her grandmother to stay with her aunt outside of Manchester where she remained for three months.