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Title INTERVIEW WITH MRS ZENA BULLMORE Description
I was born in Soho in London in 1920. At the age of 11 I won a scholarship to The Greycoat Hospital School in Westminster. It was a wonderful school. You matriculated at the age of 16 and my parents needed me to go to work but they believed that the only way out of poverty was by education so they scrimped and saved and my Dad worked all hours to keep me at school send me to college. When I left school I went to the City of London College where I did a very good secretarial training.
I got a good job with The British Non-Ferrous Metal Research Association. They were doing research on new developments in metallurgy and beginning to plan for the war. Some of their work became confidential. With the danger of the blitz they decided it would be safer if they moved out of London. Our Deputy Director lived in Box Lane in Boxmoor, Hemel Hempstead so we moved out to that area. We rented part of the Cooper Technical Bureau in Berkhampsted. I moved into digs in Hemel Hempstead and then I moved to Berkhamsted. I used to go home to London at the weekend. That carried on until after the war. Then I got married and came to live in Hemel.
My problem always was public transport. The last bus back to Hemel Hempstead from Berkhamsted was ? hour before the last film finished. The cinema was where it is now at the Rex but the building was different and much nicer to look at than it is now. I used to have to leave the film half an hour early and that was my one constant complaint. When I went home to London I sometimes got the Greenline bus and sometimes the train if I had to work Saturdays. It was quite normal to work a 5? day week and you got called up if you didn?t. My job was in a reserved occupation so you kept to the rules.
The old part of Hemel was as it is now except the roads have been widened and the shops are different. Marlowes was quite different. There were little shops there. Many houses didn?t have bathrooms so once or twice a week I went to the public baths. You paid something like 3 pennies for a bath. The people in Boxmoor thought of themselves as ?up the hill? and the others were ?down the hill?. The people in Box Lane looked down on Hemel people. It was funny to me as an outsider.
The walking we used to do! You have to realise that in London there was often a shortage of food and you couldn?t get tomatoes but in Berkhamsted, up on the common, there were greenhouses where they grew tomatoes. I used to walk up to the greenhouses and buy 20 pounds and carry them back ? I was living at the opposite end of Berkhamsted then. I feel exhausted now at the thought, but you did it! I gave some to my future mother-in-law and took the rest home. The train from Euston came to Berkhamsted. They were steam trains, of course, so they weren?t very clean but they were reliable. I paid something like 2 shillings and 9 pence return.
We went on living as if there were no bombs, no air raids at all. You accepted all that. When you went out you never knew if you were going to get back again. I belonged to a girls? club. There were a lot of young women but also men of course, who lived alone and when the blitz was on the club used to provide a bed for them and an evening meal and of course they had company and somehow you feel in less danger. We had a rota amongst ourselves ? and we were all female ? for fire watching. This was standing on the roof with a bucket of sand for the fire bombs. With high explosives you knew you didn?t stand a chance but with fires you threw on the sand and that did the job. I always did Saturday nights because I was only there at weekends. I had the chance to go out one night and asked a friend to swop with me and she did. They had a direct hit and she was blown to bits and I?ve felt guilty ever since. But my mother thanked God.
We had instructions to hide under a table when the bombs came down but I don?t know what good it would have done. Just a bit of wood wasn?t going to save you but you felt better. It?s funny, human nature. The worst bit was the silence. You heard a whistle at first as it was coming down and when it was silent you knew it was about to explode but you didn?t know which direction it was coming from. I didn?t go into the underground because we were lucky and had a basement in our house but I saw bunk beds on the platform pressed up against the wall so there was still room for the passengers to go by. One night a fire bomb was dropped at the end of our road and the fire brigade wanted us out just in case. That was the only time we went to a communal shelter.
When we had our first air raid siren on the day war was declared ? it was a practice warning. We all queued up to go to the shelter in Golden Square, off Regent Street. The man behind me couldn?t keep his hands to himself. I can remember that more than anything. I think he thought, ?This is my last chance.?
We helped refugees ? I?m Jewish by the way. We put them up in our home and gave them hospitality. I got a travel scholarship before the war. I wouldn?t go to Germany because Hitler was there so I got permission to go to German speaking Switzerland. I had 3 wonderful months there. One friend I made there came to stay with us and the war came and she couldn?t get back. She stayed with us through the war. We knew about the concentration camps. You hear people in Britain say that they didn?t know what was going on but I did and if I knew, so did other people and the media must have known. Silly people like me used to feel so guilty because there was nothing we could do to get them out or rescue them. All we could do was give hospitality to those who got out. Most refugees arrived just before the war but some escaped from concentration camps. They must have had help but it was all very secret. We none of us knew who was doing what. Houses were a problem. They weren?t building during the war. But there were jobs because of the war effort. I can?t think of anyone who was capable of work and couldn?t get a job. Britain was very good and people weren?t turned away whether they were illegal or not. The general public weren?t prejudiced. We were all fighting the enemy together.
I never considered leaving Britain but I had relatives who went to America. An aunt of mine was terrified of the Germans coming here and wangled some little phials of poison so if the Nazis came and took her, she planned to take it. My mother took a different line. She said if they?re going to try to kill me I?ll do my best to take at least one of them with me. She was determined not to make it easy for them. Dad took a philosophical line. He joined the Home Guard because he was too old to join up. He loved it because it took him back to the First World War and he was a good sniper. And he liked the comradeship. They had shooting matches with rifles. As far was we were concerned, it was the boys having fun ? but they were very necessary.
My husband was mentioned in dispatches. When the war broke out he was on the Maginot Line in France. The Germans were in occupation there but he got out. We didn?t know if he was dead or alive. He was hidden by the French in Normandy for 2 months and then 5 of them (soldiers) got a boat and rowed across the Channel. When they landed in Portsmouth they were arrested as fifth columnists and put in prison! But they got out quickly when it was realised who they were. We had no idea what was happening and then he turned up one day and that was lovely.
He was then flown in to Burma and that wasn?t very nice. When I said to him years later I felt guilty about the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he said, ?Don?t ever regret it. We were living from day to day and were in the jungle being hunted like animals. We couldn?t have survived very long. Those bombs saved our lives by ending the war.? I?ve never forgotten that and that?s why I?m passing it onto you. There are always 2 sides to everything. He went through hell for 2? years in the jungle not expecting to live but that was a part of his life he couldn?t talk about. He was a decent, good man and I think he must have killed some people to save his own life and he was ashamed of it, though he didn?t regret it because it was war time and it was his life against the Japanese. But he wasn?t happy about it. I can tell you, when we first got married I woke up one night and his hands were round my throat in his sleep. I shook him awake and he was horrified and it never happened again. He was having a nightmare about the war and I never teased him about it because he was so upset. I don?t like to think of the people who suffered and died during that war being forgotten.
Interview by Samantha Rees, Alex Bourne, Rory Tinker and Matthew Henton.Keywords Berkhamsted; Boxmoor; blitz; fire-watching; Home Guard; refugees; concentration camps; Burma Collection Home Front Place Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamsted, London Year 1939-1945 Conflict World War Two File type html Record ID number 182 Can you add any more information to this resource?
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