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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Pennie Hedge, a volunteer for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ London, on behalf of Dora Doughty and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Doughty fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

At the beginning of the war, me and my friends, we were all sacked. All the employers thought it would be too difficult for us to travel up to town. But after two months nothing had happened, of course then they wanted us back. So then we all got our jobs back in London, different jobs. The bombing didn’t start for quite a time after that, I can’t remember the exact dates.

So then the bombing did start and I was working in London, so of course when it happened there were no trains because they were bombing the railways. So we used to go up by lorry. Everybody did it. There was a chap who used to go up to London near where I lived. And he used to take us up, right through Bermondsey and places, and drop us off. At that time I was working at the old ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ in Savoy Hill, that is the building, but it wasn’t the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ then. Coming home at night we used to stand on Waterloo Bridge, loads of people, this is what we did, and lorries used to come over and we all used to pile in, open lorries. If they were going our way they used to drop us off. But that was what it was like getting to work for quite a long time when they started bombing. Then after a while there wasn’t so much bombing and then we got the trains back.

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