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

I was working for an insurance company in the records office in London during the war, this being considered to be essential work for war. We had a person at the top of our building watching for “Doodle Bugs” and if they were coming our way we had to get under the desk.

I lived in Richmond and I remember spending months at a time sleeping in the Anderson shelter in our garden. It had light , 4 bunk beds and my father had made it so that we had to go through a shed to go down into the Anderson shelter. It was quite comfortable.

One night when coming home from work on the bus, I heard the siren as the bus neared Richmond Railway station. I immediately jumped off the bus, ran as fast as my legs could carry me up Church Road and got into our house. Mum shouted at me to come to the shelter and as I went in, the bombs fell. The noise was incredible, the ground shook for what seemed like ages, but fortunately the shelter although it seemed to rock stayed in one piece.

In a while, when the planes had stopped coming, the warden came along and although my mum offered to have some more people in the shelter, we were all ordered to get out immediately. There was no time to get anything. All I had was an alarm clock and my sister had a bag of cakes! We were taken to an air raid shelter on the Green and then on to a Church hall. Fortunately we stayed in our family groups. We were all hungry and without any food. We then went on to Express Dairy where we were fed (for free). We spent 2 days and nights here and I remember phoning work to say I couldn’t come in! It seemed necessary at the time.

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