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Title	INTERVIEW WITH MRS WINIFRED LAWRENCE, HER DAUGHTER MARGARET AND SON- IN -LAW DENNIS.
Description	Winifred- I had a semi-detached house and there was a cupboard under the stairs. When the siren went the children sat in there with a rug and torches and a meccano set until the ?all clear? sounded. Eventually my husband and I dug a great big hole in the garden so we would have an underground shelter ? that was before Anderson shelters came in. We would go down there with something to eat and drink and a torch. Margaret ? And our 6 week old cousin in a drawer! You couldn?t take a pram down there so we wrapped him up and put him in a drawer. Ken weighed only 3? pounds when he was born. The doctor brought a shoe box to the hospital and the nurses filled it with cotton wool and he was laid in the shoe box and put in the airing cupboard. There were 2 nuns who came to the hospital and volunteered to stay. They fed him every 3 hours night and day until he weighed 5 pounds and we could have him home. Our shelter had wonderful long benches made of earth and we had carpet from the stairs to sit on. It was really quite exciting. At night we would go the bedroom window and you could see the search lights in London. The whole sky was lit up and barrage balloons were going up. But we weren?t really frightened because it wasn?t close enough to affect us. It was an adventure. It was only in later life that you realise?. Winifred ? But we all had to have a pail of water and a stirrup pump so if anything caught fire you could deal with it. It was a case of being prepared. M- It was a community thing. It was nice going to bed and getting up at one in the morning and having a picnic in the shelter! Dennis- If you hadn?t got a garden you couldn?t have an Anderson shelter so we had an indoor Morrison shelter. It had huge metal sheeting over the top and wire netting at the sides. We only used it once because nobody would go in it. You had to crawl in and then you couldn?t move. We had it in the front room. Also we had the brick shelters in the village built in the road ? a complete brick building with a door at the end. They were public shelters built for the council houses and about 6 houses would share a shelter between them. But I can?t really remember a lot of people using them. Another thing was the Home Guard round here. They dug trenches about 8 feet deep surrounded by sandbags and with slits for guns and corrugated roofs. They were great places for us children during the day, running in and out. The only thing was when it rained they got a whole load of water in the bottom. You can imagine one chap in there with a gun and a great big tank coming down the roads. Useless! Dennis - The blackout was difficult, especially in the bakery where you were working early in the morning and late at night. We had great big frames to put up against the window but it made it very hot. You couldn?t get any air We never ran out of flour but cake making materials were very hard to get. I don?t know what the fats and sugars were. One day we opened the oven and blue smoke was coming out like a car exhaust, so God knows what was in that! Winifred- My husband was working with the waterworks and did home guard duty on the railway. They didn?t have guns or anything, only sticks, so how they were supposed to defend anything, I don?t know. We had a semi-detached house and they took our railings and the gates because they wanted metal to make munitions. Margaret - Dennis?s mother used to make clothes out of rabbit skins. His 2 sisters had rabbit coats. Dennis - We had hundreds of rabbits in our garden at one time. Father used to kill them and mother would skin them. She used to pin the skins out on a board and rub saltpetre into them until they were soft and then make coats. Dennis ? I recall the day that war broke out. There was a terrific bang. They fired a gun to notify that the war had started and my friend?s mother dropped dead on the spot. They had about 4 children. It was very tragic. I went to school in Bovingdon and whenever the sirens went you had to run home because you all lived in the local area. So you were sitting in school hoping the siren would go. You didn?t rush back afterwards! You took your time. I remember one day a big German bomber came over and just as it got overhead we heard all these guns go. I think they just shot them off to frighten the people but we all dived under our desks. We would stand in our garden and watch the fires in London. I remember one day, it was a nice summer?s day and there was a ?bang, bang, bang?. There was a dog fight going on between the German bombers and the English fighters. They were bombing the car works in Luton but it looked as if it was just overhead. There were a lot of army manoeuvres in the area. A convoy would come along and park up in the woods and us kids would go up there and have great fun. Sophie?s (Sophie is Winifred?s great granddaughter) dad found some ammunition. He was photographed for the Gazette. There was lots left lying around for years afterwards. Wartime was an exciting time to be a child. It was like an adventure ? seeing troops coming through, spotting a new type of armoured car??. I think the worst part of the war for us was the flying bombs ? the V1s. They had their own particular sound. You couldn?t mistake it. If the engine stopped they were coming down. You hoped they would keep going and going. Bovingdon airfield was built in 1942-3 by the Americans for the B45 bombers. It didn?t attract bombs because the main bombing was over by then. The Americans used to crash the planes regularly ? about one a week. One plane took off fully loaded, decided it couldn?t make it and it didn?t. It went through two fields, a herd of cows, through a wood and finished 50 yards from my friend?s house. Luckily nothing went off. They regularly went across the road but I can only ever remember two catching fire. Margaret - Very important people came there just after the war. I was working as a governess in Box Lane and one day we had to take all the children in and close all the gates because a motorcade was coming down with ?Winnie? Churchill in it. The whole village was full of these fantastic Americans. They would come into our shop and buy up English chocolate and English tea. They would clear the shelves. They were dressed in white and looked quite super. A lot of the local girls were after the USAF chaps. The USAF was banned from all the local pubs ? there was a lot of trouble with the locals. Dennis - They were service men in a war, likely to get killed any day ? they wanted to go out and enjoy themselves. They had their own social clubs on the base. It was like a small town. Squatters moved in when the Americans moved out. As rumours got round that there were huts going, people came from everywhere. Eventually the huts deteriorated and the council had to build proper houses. That?s why the population of Bovingdon went up. It was 500 during the war but it?s 7,000 now. Interview by Sophie Horwood and Zoe Burrell
Keywords	air raid shelters, Morrison shelter, stirrup pump, Home Guard, blackout, V1, Bovingdon airbase, USAF
Collection	Home Front
Place	Hemel Hempstead, Bovingdon
Year	1939-1945
Conflict	World War Two
File type	html
Record ID number	163

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