The Blitz In Rosemary Avenue

A Memory of West Molesey.

We moved in to our new house in Rosemary Avenue in 1938. We had a Triumph car and my father built a garage of timber and asbestos sheets and laid concrete runways for it (they're still there). I started school in 1939 at the infant school in Down Street. One of our neighbours had a daughter Shirley, the same age as me and we went to school together. When the Blitz first started in 1940 we couldn't get an air raid shelter and I had to sleep on a mattress under the stairs. One night I was woken in the small hours by the sound of my mother sweeping broken glass down the stairs. A German bomb had landed outside the kitchen window in Shirley's house and their house had fallen down. Her parents were asleep in the front bedroom, their bed had fallen down to the ground floor and they were pinned down by wooden joists across the bed. Her grandmother was sleeping in the back bedroom and was underneath a large wardrobe. Luckily no-one was seriously hurt although the grandmother had lost her false teeth. My father's garage collapsed and some debris went through the car's sunshine roof. There was a crack down one corner of our house and the bathroom tiles didn't line up across the corner, but after the windows had been replaced the house was declared fit for habitation. We couldn't get petrol for the car during the war, so my father had it repaired and sold it to Edwin Fox, the radio dealer in East Molesey, who used it for his business for several years. The rubble was cleared away and we children used to play in the empty bomb site. After the war the missing houses were re-built to the original design, although the chimneys were turned sideways, probably due to new building regulations.