Anybody here old enough to remember the Blitz?

[raccoon]

Or were you sent to the country/Canada/US at that time?

Would you care to share some of your memories?

[BooScout]

1. DH's auntie next door remembers it....

But she was in Wales and not London at the time. She worked in a munitions factory until they figured out her eyesight sucked.....ya sort of need good eyesight when working on bombs:nuke:

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. My mother and aunt were evacuated to Canada

This was written by my aunt: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/16/a7466916.shtml

[T_i_B]

3. My dad got evacuated to Loughborough

But didn't like the family he was staying with so he went back to Sheffield.

[Nihil]

4. My Mum was in Tottenham for the first part of the war ...

... doing clerical work for the (W)RAF in the city.
My Dad was in the RAF (ground crew in North Africa & Italy) but both
of them used to tell me about the air-raids during the Blitz.

My Dad hated that there was a mobile anti-aircraft gun (rail mounted)
that would nip down the line at the bottom of Mum's road, send off
half a dozen shells then move along again - before the return fire
from the bombers found them ... meaning that the houses nearby would
get pelted with streams of tracer! He reckoned that he got shot at
more times on leave there in London than on active duty ...

Mum was eventually evacuated to the Midlands in 1943 when pregnant
with my sister but she hated it. She was lodged with a couple who
basically didn't want her (or her daughter) but only accepted the
situation for the extra rations that it brought in, especially things
like eggs & milk (but these didn't make it to Mum's plate and were
"confiscated" by the husband). I obviously only heard one side of
the story but Mum had no good word for the husband and usually described
him as "a pompous cowardly so-and-so" but I suspect some of this was
down to resentment that her husband was fighting overseas while this
guy had managed to get some kind of medical exemption that somehow
didn't interfere with his job, his social life or his black-market
activities. The final straw came when they tried to take the fruit
and chocolate rations that her family had sent up for them. She was
glad to get out of there even though it meant coming back to London,
complete with V1 & V2 attacks.

My mother-in-law was still at school in South Wales and had two kids
evacuated to stay with her & her parents (her dad was a miner).
The more touching tale she remembers was having to find the lad at
the bottom of the garden as he didn't answer when called in for
dinner. The lad was leaning over the fence and watching the little
river rushing by. When she told him to come in, he kept insisting
he wanted to stay for a little bit longer as "he wanted to wait for
it to finish and see the end of the water".

There were other kids at the school (all taught together, evacuees
and "natives") who hadn't seen farm animals before: they'd seen
pictures of cows or whatever but never real ones and were stunned
by the size, the noise and the smell of them.

My M-I-L's best friend was an evacuee who, at the end of the war,
decided she wanted to stay with the host family rather than go back
to London. Her natural mother wasn't bothered so she stayed (she was
about 15 or 16) and, for all intents & purposes, became a native of
the valleys. She became my wife's godmother and, although she ended
up traveling back & forth to care for her native mother at the end
out of a sense of duty, she always viewed her "hosts" as her real
parents - they were the ones who had raised her and given her a whole
new start in life, escaping London of the Blitz.

[Skittles]

5. my mum survived WWII bombs near Great Yarmouth

[dipsydoodle]

6. No memorys.

Wasn't born until October '43 - nine months after my parents married that January...lol. My mother ,who was then only 18, my grandmother and I got shipped around a bit leaving my grandfather and my mother's younger brother at home in Wembley. I know we landed up in Dorset in a flea infested wash house would you believe. Apparently my grandmother decided we'd be better off in the street so that's where we went ! Fortunately a very kind lady spotted us and took us into her house. After a short period my grandmother decided we'd all be better off back in Wembley and just chance the bombs - a V1 Doodle Bug flying bomb took a house out just round the corner from ours - only about 60 yards away. Forces mail was obviously censored so we didn't where my father was between April/May '43 and 1945 when he showed up at the door. He was in the Royal Engineers it turned out he'd been in North Africa and then into Italy with the Sicily landings. At short while later my mum , dad and me shipped out to Austria - army in occupation.

[canetoad]

7. My Dad was in the Royal Engineers too

I'm a bit younger than you, born in '54. As a little kid in Scotland then then Midlands, I used to ask him about the long scar running down his forehead and nose. His reply was, "During the war I was trapped at the bottom of a gully, all my regiment were dead and three hundred nazis were trying to capture me. I killed all of them, until in the end Hitler came running down the hill with his bayonet outstretched. I had to fight Hitler hand to hand and he bayoneted me in the face before I killed him too."

I was probably 5 or 6 before I could work out dates and ages; my dad was too young to have been in the war!

In fact, he was conscripted to the RE as part of the occupation force in '52 and the scar came from falling asleep at the wheel of a jeep during exercises and going through the windscreen. We laughed about that story until he died in 2003.

[dipsydoodle]

8. My Grandfather was too

In the early twenties, due his water company background inbetween enlistng when he was only 14 and getting discharged when they found out...lol, he was out in Basra putting their water supply in.

I never figured why my Dad rarely mentioned the war other than to give me a comparison like when I was whinging about digging potoato drills. My Mother expained after he died that when they shipped out from Africa to Sicily he landed up on a different ship from all his mates - their ship was literally blown out of the water with all hands lost.