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This story is submitted by Helen Hughes of the People's War team in Wales on behalf of Lorna Colley and is added with her permission.

One particular night the beginning of January — my cousin’s birthday - it was about 2nd January and there was a very very bad air raid in Cardiff…and we as a family had gathered because it was my cousin’s birthday and I remember having a bowl of nuts, and all of a sudden when the bombs were dropping — because we didn’t go to the shelter because it was his birthday and we were having a family get together….and all the nuts went flying all over the room, because we were all scarpering then because of hearing the bombs dropping and the guns firing…. Then we decided it was about time we went to the air raid shelter. We had Anderson shelters in the back garden and we had a few months later we had land mines dropped at the bottom of Coburn Street …that would be Wyvern Road, on the scout hall and the pub that was all down the bottom…. That’s when I lost my school friend ….they were killed when the land mines dropped. My next door neighbour, my mother’s friend, she was terrified — absolutely terrified — and the particular night of the land mines we had gone into her air raid shelter and she was lying as low down on the floor as she could, she was terrified and the tremendous sound of the land mines was something else…and it felt as if the whole shelter was being lifted out of the ground and dropped. It wasn’t but that was the sensation we experienced. And her husband unfortunately at some stage had been silly enough to try and lift and incendiary bomb and he’d lost the tops of his fingers….Sidney Hodge he was and they lived next door.

Cardiff was bombed quite often….my sister had been evacuated to Ferndale and one night when Cardiff was having a very heavy air raid my sister was with a Roman Catholic school and the nuns had realised what was going on in Cardiff and some of the children had gone up onto the mountains and could actually see some of the fires in the very far distance from Cardiff they were all terrified. And the nuns came down to Cardiff the next morning and went to everybody’s home to find out whether or not the parents were safe….and I remember that very well. I remember the nun actually coming to our house to see if my mother and father had survived. My father was in the First World War…and my parents were rather older. My sister was nine years older than me and had been evacuated, but I was so small I hadn’t been evacuated. They didn’t evacuate the younger children. I suppose really there was a lot of excitement really because all this was happening. We didn’t realise the horror of it….It was only when we realised that we’d lost relatives and friends that’s when the horror struck and we thought “I’m never going to see them again”. I lost two cousins, one went down in the Royal Navy…and my other cousin was killed in the Far East.
There was a woman who lived with the Hodges next door called Blanche Francis and her husband was torpedoed and I remember being on the door when the telegram boy came to deliver Blanche the note to say her husband had gone down, been torpedoed….and that was very sad. It was more sad because I didn’t see my aunt receiving the news about my cousins, but I did see Blanche receiving the news of her husband and he was a lovely man, he’d been a next door neighbour and we remembered him very well. That was very sad.

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