Bombs dropped in the ward of: Finchley Church End

Alice Macdonald
(fathers name)

THE CAT KNEW BEFORE WE DID.

I suppose the very first incident of seeing a German plane was being told by my Dad to come and watch a dog fight between one of our boys and a German Plane one Saturday afternoon at the front gate of our house in Edmonton, North London. We watched this for a while and my Dad was chuffed to bits when our boy won.

Another incident I remember was at Christmas 1940. We had had our roof blown in during a German raid. Mum had made some Christmas Puddings and they were still boiling on the stove and not damaged but the kitchen was full of plaster and debris. Mum was in a right state and the whole war was beginning to make her ill. Dad made her pack in work to try to help her cope. It didn’t help that we had to sit in the air raid shelter night after night. The couple downstairs had bunk beds but we had to make do with chairs so we hardly got any sleep.

Our cat used to jump into the cupboard under the sink just before the raid happened. She knew when they were coming before anybody else did. Then we could hear them. It was a very faint and distant noise. A sort of jerking noise that got louder and louder. Then the searchlights would come on and the guns would start firing. They were just at the back of our house so you could imagine how noisy they were. One night the Germans dropped something like hot tar bombs which set everyone’s hedges alight in the street.

That was enough and my Dad decided that he would take us away from London. He wrote to his Father who was living just outside Rochdale and he managed to get us an empty house to live in. So the last night in London was spent with family in Finchley. I didn’t want to leave my friends but I had to obey. On the way to our new home in a small village called Milnrow, I had to sit up front with the driver of the removal van. When we got there he said that it would drive me mad to be in such a desolate place. For a young girl coming from London, he wasn’t wrong.

Eventually I was to do some war work for GEC Electrics. I had to clean and measure the Tungsten wire for use in valves for our bombers. I also had to take my turn doing fire watching in the evenings. This meant that I had to climb onto the roof via the fire escape.

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Keith HArtwell on behalf of Alice Macdonald [the author] and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.