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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sue Manning-Jones on behalf of Joy Earl and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Earl fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

We went on holiday to Weston-super-Mare. My sister, who was five years younger than me, had a bad knee so we spent a lot of time at the hospital having new dressings put on. When it came to the end of the week my father suggested that my mother and we girls stayed on as the weather was lovely and we had missed half the holiday. We were going to do that but on the Friday night Weston had its first raid and on Saturday my mother had this terrific feeling, almost like a voice in her head, saying “You’ve had had a nice holiday, lovely weather — go home and be thankful”. She wasn’t really taking any notice but it kept recurring in her head and so she told my father and he said “Right, we’ll go home now”. So we threw everything in the suitcases and left Weston at about 8 p.m. On the way out we saw lots of ambulances and fire engines and my father said he thought that they were expecting another raid that night. We got home safely but learnt that the whole of the area where we had been staying was gone and everybody was killed.

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