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My name is Hilda Thompson. My maiden name was Urry. I was born in 1927, and I lived in Newhaven during the war.

I remember them building the air raid shelters outside of the infant’s school in South Lane. We lived along South Lane at the time and saw all the workmen building there.

When I was about eleven, I was on Newhaven station helping the evacuees, come from London. We took them along South Road up to Hillcrest Boy’s school. When we got there everybody was able to come in and they chose the people they wanted. I always remember a lady and two kiddies being left behind. So I took them home to my mum. We didn’t have hardly any room, but she let them have the attic. Within a few months they’d gone home again.

A year after that most of the evacuees had gone home and we ourselves were evacuated to Bedfordshire, which wasn’t very nice. We were evacuated and didn’t like it. My dad came up and got us when we’d been up there about a year but we couldn’t come back to Newhaven because it was too dangerous so my mother had to move to Peacehaven. We moved up to Peacehaven and I always remember that there weren’t very many houses there then and where the fields were on the sides of the main road, it was all barbed wire and there was prisoners of war in some of these compounds there - German prisoners of war, and we’d just look at them, like monkeys in a zoo I suppose, from then on, they looked just the same as everybody else really. I always remember that.

After that we moved back to Newhaven again, and that’s when, just before D-Day, when I was much older, and we were able to come back to Newhaven. Nothing had changed but it wasn’t so dangerous. And I never went back to school any more.

And then I worked at Wheatley’s in Newhaven. One day while I was working there we watched a battle in the air between a Spitfire from Friston chasing a Doodlebug. Quite a crowd of us watched from where we worked at Wheatley’s and while we were watching he tipped the Doodlebug and got caught in the blast. Then we saw it coming down and burst into flames. Being young and full of energy, ran across the road, went to go through the fence, and as we went to go through, the bullets started coming. I don’t know what we thought we could do trying to run across a field with a burning aircraft but once the bullets started we were back and back over the road again. The bullets started coming all over so we had to run back and start work again. We did hear that the young man came from Friston. The next day we had a collection at work, took quite a bit of money, and two of the ladies that worked there took the collection up to Friston. Up by Friston forest. And gave it to the man in charge which would put it into the Airmen’s Association.

We had hundreds of tanks coming round for the D-Day landings. We lived in South Road, and the tanks were coming around the corner and they were churning up the road. Day and night it went on, it seemed to go on for weeks, but it didn’t. It cracked all the walls in the cottages there, and well, it was quite a sight really. After D-Day was announced we knew what it was all about. We’d seen the building going on down at the mud hole and we knew that all these soldiers were making their way down there, and again there were hundreds and hundreds of soldiers up on Mount Pleasant. They were all coming into Newhaven. It was all ready for D-Day.

676 words.

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