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This contribution was submitted by Pat Fleming to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with her permission.

It was quite exciting…the excitment began to wear off in March 1940 when Scarborough had its first blitz. Scarborough did fairly well because it wasn’t an industrial town. But this night they sent a whole pack of bombers over. With it being a tall Victorian house we had a cellar and the cupboard under the stairs was in the living room and my father used to pick up two boards and we had to get down a ladder and he’d built a sort of hut in the corner of the cellar and — I thought it was rather clever — he’d made a notice saying Foxes retreat — because our name was Fox. And he’d made bunks and he’d stuck magazine pictures on the wall and put a little electric fire….so when the warning went I’d be taken out of bed and carried down into the cellar and the people next door — we’d knocked a hole in the wall — and the people next door came through. And it was quite cosy, it was fun. Also he’d knocked a little square in the wall into the yard and put a little shuttered door….I’m not sure if that was for air or to shout if the house fell on top of us, but I always remember this little peepy hole. Anyway this night the planes came over in a drove. And the streets — being Victorian — were in parallel and first all BOMB they knocked down a boarding house the other side of Scarborough Cricket Field and killed a lot of servicemen. Our street was next and there was a great THUD — it’s difficult to describe — the feeling goes right up through your feet, THUMP and Dad pushed me into the corner and sort of fell over me to protect me, but he’d pushed me onto the electric fire and I shouted “Daddy my bottom’s burning!” So he quickly grasped me ….and they went right across…there was an awful lot of action. So when it sort of calmed down a bit, Dad went upstairs to the top windows where you got a good view and when he came back he said “Lass” — he was a broad Yorkshireman — he said: “Lass, I think the school’s on fire”. But it was very disappointing because what had happened was…there was Dennis’s Printers next door to the school…it printed seaside postcards, Christmas cards etc. It had got the full lot, it had gone up, the school — it wasn’t touched. And next day when we went out into the streets…the smell of burning charred paper, because all of the streets were covered with these papers, burnt picture postcards blowing around…and when we got to the school we were very pleased because the teacher told us to go back home again!

The school was on the top…up our road, across the main bus route into town, and up hill to the school on the top. Well just as we had got our coats on and were going on the siren started…which gives you a horrible feeling at the bottom of your tummy. So I started running down the hill my gas mask was banging on my side and I got to the main crossroads and I looked to the left and I saw this aeroplane… I didn’t know but it was a Meserchmidt …it was very, very low…I could see the black cross. It came over my head and after he passed me he started machine gunning, so I ran on home and I missed by inches the postman on his bike along the road…he was killed. So that was a near miss, and during the bombing of Scarborough our house was missed by nine houses. Three houses were demolished up the road and the people in the houses killed.

Down at the bottom of the road there’s a beautiful park called Peaseholm Park, laid out like a Willow Pattern plate with a lake, an island, a bridge and a pagoda and a waterfall. This was a wonderful place for children to play..we only had backyards but we had all this facility. This day we’d gone down to the park with our picnic and gone over the little bridge onto the top of the island and playing our usual games when suddenly I saw this plane, this English RAF plane and it was coming very low, right over our heads and I could see it was going to crash so I said to the rest of the gang “Duck!”, but just as I was about to duck the plane crashed and all the bits of aeroplane flew up into the sky and the pilot and the navigator were killed. It turned out that his mother had a hotel there and he was showing off to his mother and came down too low. So if you go to Scarborough today and go along that avenue behind the park, that hotel is now called Lysander, because that’s what his aeroplane was called. He didn’t crash into the hotels, because there was a lot of grass around about and he crashed into the grass. It was very sad. I have a diary at home that I kept from the age of eight and I’ve said: “It was very sad I felt sorry for the boys and I prayed for them”. I really felt sorry for them.

It was good the way people helped each other…and the spirit. I mean all sorts of awful things were happening, but there was nothing a good cup of tea couldn’t put right. People joked and laughed..we listened to ITMAR on the radio..and we had all these catch phrases “can I do you now sir?” Mrs. Mop. They had all sorts of double meanings which of course went completely over our heads as children. And dad was always bringing soldiers home and some Americans came once and you met all sorts of interesting people you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. And the Americans gave me a pile of American comics — now that was something! We were all very exhausted at the end of the war, but we survived

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