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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Pam Vincent of Age Concern Shropshire Telford & Wrekin on behalf of Edna Wood and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was a bus conductress during the war.

One night we were all in the house when the sirens went off. We were about to go down to the shelters when the incendiaries started to fall. Two landed in our house. One was in mum’s bedroom and one on the landing. We went up to fight them, to put sand on them. We always kept two buckets of water and two buckets of sand on the landing with a stirrup pump to pump the water. You couldn’t put water on the incendiaries, just sand. (My nephew once mixed water with the sand and it came out just like a sandcastle! Unfortunately he later got killed when he was just five.)

The fires started to burn really fast then. We had managed to get out when the actual bombs started to fall. One landed three to four houses away from us and it hit the one house. The blast made the house fall in. It exploded and stuff came falling down from the walls.

My mum was injured. I had a little cut, that’s all. Mum went into Worcester hospital for quite a while. We worried at the time, but she was fortunately alright in the end.

I also worked on Cosford Aerodrome before I became a bus conductress. I was an electrician, putting speakers in the airmen’s huts. We had to sign the Secret’s Act. Being women, we were always the last to be served in the canteen, so had to have what was left, if we were lucky.

I used to travel on the train from Cosford to Birmingham. One time, we had had a bad night. There had been an air raid and we were all tired. One lad, Donald, should have woken us up when we reached Birmingham but he fell asleep too! Eventually the platform manager came to find us.

We used to queue up for food in the Bull Ring. We joined the queues first before asking what they were queuing for. We would dodge backwards and forwards between several queues at the same time.

I got that I didn’t used to go into the public shelters. Someone I knew had been in a public shelter when it got hit and they all got drowned from the water that was fighting the fires above. Too many people died in shelters.

I was in the cinema once watching a “Honky Tonky” film in Lozells. The commissionaire had to ask us to leave as the roof was on fire. He went back in for the money, but unfortunately everyone still in there got killed.

There was a lot of fun in those days but also a lot of heartache.

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