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This story was submitted by Helen Hughes of the People's War Team in Wales on behalf of Trevor Lewis and is added with his permission.

I was a kitchen porter at the Dorothy café in High Street, Cardiff at the start of 1941…
At about six o’clock I was just finishing work and it was my job to lock up everything, turn the gases off, electrics and shut the door and out. As I get out into the street, someone shouts to me … “run for your life.!” I couldn’t figure out what the devil he was on about. But you could hear incendiary bombs dropping …they were dropping just like rain…tap tap tap…all the way down the street. So I run across the road under the Castle Arcade…it was open then for that purpose as an air raid shelter and I went underneath and then came up to go home. I’m going across Canton bridge and there were incendiaries dropping on the bridge. In those times they had sandbags tied around the lamposts…so I went to put a sandbag to put it ontop of this incendiary — but it was solid it was frozen solid. I couldn’t even move it. So I left it and carried on going home. So I’m going up Market Road by the secondary school in Canton and a chap shouts out “You cant go by here” and I shouts “Oh yes, I can…I’m going home”. That was going up in flames…an oil bomb had dropped on that school and it was ..”Oh gosh” anyway…I runs home and somebody says to me “You can’t go in your house”…he was a firewatcher. He says “You can’t go in your house, there’s been a fire there”. So I thought “Oh gosh”…went in the house …I could smell burning and things. So I went upstairs, and it was my bedroom. The bed was destroyed…but what had happened the firewatchers and things had thrown the bed out of the window into the back….and there was my suit. The only suit I’d ever had hanging on the back of the bedroom door on a hanger, burnt in half. It was like as though they’d cut it right across….and there was a hole in the roof where the incendiary bomb had come through. Some 16th birthday…January 2nd 1941 - I read my birthday cards by the light of the wireless…

The next time I had any problems was when a bomb dropped around the corner from us in Carmarthen Street, and it destroyed around four or five houses. My neighbour Mr. Williams and I were standing talking in the street — we were firewatching that particular night. He said to me “get down” and pushed me to the floor…and the next thing you could see this flash, and there was a bomb and paving stones flying about and bits of rubble and stuff and four or five houses were just brought down…so we stuck there and then went around as soon as it settled down to see if there was anyone injured or anything….we were lucky and there was no-one injured or anything like that. But about ten minutes later the police came up from Canton police station, which was about 100 yards away…they were a long time behind us.

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