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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Swindon College on behalf of Kathleen Mortimer and has been added to the site with her permission. Kathleen fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

My home was in a village called Lee on the Broadlands Estate when war broke out. This was considered to be a safe area, in fact so safe that we had a family from Southampton (husband, wife and 3 boys) who used to come and stay quite regularly during night times, especially during air raids on Southampton.

But a mock aerodrome was built close to the estate. Every time the Romsey siren went off, the lights on the aerodrome would then be switched on. This was to act as a decoy for the Germans who were trying to bomb Southampton.

It really wasn’t any safer in our house than in Southampton, being so close to the mock aerodrome meant we had many more planes flying in the area.

We had an Anderson shelter in the garden. One night during an air raid a bomb landed in the field next to our house. We hadn’t had enough time to go to the shelter. Every window in the house was broken, but amazingly we all survived. It was very fortunate that we hadn’t had time to go to the shelter — this had been completely flattened by the force of the bomb.

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