LETTER OF THE MONTH

Wartime memories

Kavita Puri’s article on the importance of listening to the wartime stories of elderly relatives ( Hidden Histories , March) struck a chord with me. My 95-year-old mother has vivid recollections of her experiences in the war, especially of her lucky escape when her home was destroyed by a V-1‘Doodlebug’. She and her mother managed to crawl out of the ruins covered in dust and ash. However, she insisted that this occurred in 1941, which I knew was impossible.

I had heard of the Bomb Census report, which documented every bomb that fell on the country during the Second World War, so I went to the National Archives in Kew to see it. It did not take much knowledge to narrow down the period I needed to search, and I was soon handed a huge bundle of flimsy pages. It took me a few hours to flick through them, and I was on the point of giving up, when there it was: a detailed report about the destruction of several houses, including my mother’s home, in south-east London at 17.13 on 6 August 1944.