Molly Greenacre
I went to school in 1940.
And there was a huge fear from everybody, that we were going to be taken over by the Germans.
And the first thing I learned how to do was to read. And I used to read everything, including newspapers.
And it really did frighten me, what I read. And of course at school we had these ghastly trenches dug. And as a little girl we used to have to practice coming out of the school and going in these trenches along he playing field. Well, to me they towered above me.
And I went home and said to mother, well I’m not going to be buried alive, so they’ll have to shoot me when they come. She thought that was funny.
Sheila Knowles
Essentially it was a wartime school, with tape over the windows, a trench round the playing-field, drill every Monday morning when we had to put on our gas masks and march out into this muddy trench round the field.
Zena Welton
And most of the years you see were the war years, we didn’t’ seem to do too much, and we spent a lot of time rehearsing and practicing in case we heard the Germans, and we had to keep getting under the desks. We spent a lot of time getting under the desks, oh we did!
Freda Bradfield
In the beginning of the war, the evacuees all came to Martham. When I got home from school there were three mothers, two babies and a toddler, all sitting crying, haha! So much to my horror, really. And then Martham was just inundated. They all came from Bethnal Green in London, and every night they all congregated at the pubs, there was three public houses in Martham then, and then they would sit on the greens, and all the greens would be covered with mothers and babies and toddlers, literally.
And I just can’t think how we managed for food because all the rationing and what have you. And I’m trying to remember how we slept them all, I don’t know where we put them! I know I had to have a little bed in my mother’s and father’s room, and I had to give up my bedroom.
Sheila Knowles
The Germans tried to get the church.
And they used to send incendiary bombs, not the big ones. And they used to drop the bombs, down Sandy Lane, to get rid of them, so they could go back.
But we did have a big bomb, direct on one house, and that is when I lost my little school pal, and she’s on the War Memorial, Beryl Applegate.
And she died, yes.
Sheila Knowles
My aunt and uncle, and my cousin, had come out from Galston because of the bombs,
because they thought it was safer in the country. And they lived in a little thatched cottage behind Yewtree cottage.
A German gunner probably saw a chink of light and aimed at it. And my uncle got shot in the back and my aunt in her shoulder and wrists, and all I remember that night is being woken up because my young cousin who is about two got plonked into my bed. And then I think it was a day or two later, my mother noticed there was a hole in the bedroom wall from the outside into my bedroom: I slept at the back of Yewtree cottage. And the hole went right through. And so she looked in the other wall, above the bedhead, and there was the bullet embedded in the wall, and if I had been sitting up on bed it probably would have killed me.
Freda Bradfield
We were out getting cow-weed for the rabbits, because my father kept lots of rabbits during the war, that was our main diet, rabbit;
and there was a single plane came over, so low I waved to the pilot: to my horror there was Swastikas on the wings!
And my mother said ‘in the ditch!’, and we both leapt into this ditch, full of water and nettles, and ugh! Awful, and she shot at us, he machine-gunned us, but fortunately we got right down in this water and he went off and I think he did some machine-gunning in Martham.
Molly Greenacre
One day, it was a glorious summer morning,
and we got to school and we weren’t allowed to go in, because a stray German aeroplane had thought probably we would still be there, but it was probably about 8 o' clock when he shot the school up. And we were kept out of the school until it had been thoroughly inspected. But I remember going in and the floors were solid wood, and where the bullets had hit the floor there was big chips taken out of it.
Six weeks later we had a bar of chocolate each from the Canadians, so we thought that was wonderful.
Freda Bradfield
And then one night they made a mistake, and they send all these incendiary bombs designated for, we presumed, for Yarmouth, and they all dropped on Martham, and we had no end in our garden and my dad was busy putting out the fire and then he got the call, he had to go to Station Yard, that was of prime importance, because there was all the ammunition, there was all these trucks with ammunition in them, and my uncle Jack, he was in the Home Guard and he was there as well, and they were putting out all these fires and suddenly they heard a whistling noise, which you knew then there was a big bomb coming down, and they just with one accord leapt under the trucks—which were full of ammunition, remember—and this high explosive landed under a field next to the station, and the blast from the explosion as they lay there lifted the trucks up off the rails in the air and then they came down and landed on the rails again neatly. And they didn’t realise what had happened until the next day, when they realised what could have happened…if that high explosive had landed in the yard, then half of Martham, no all of Martham, would have probably gone.
Sheila Knowles
Things were beginning to get very short, and the braids and the flower were getting very dark, not black, and once a week we had a pie come round, a meat and potato pie, and it was called…have you heard of the Woolerton pie? And we thought this pie was lovely, this was something extra during the war, a little special thing.
Molly Greenacre
And I went to Cambridge,
and I was one of the first people to learn how to use a comptometer. And the Ministry of Food sent me to Cambridge with another girl, and we came back after two or three months training, and we had a computer each…no, not a computer, a comptometer, and did all the maths on the comptometer.
Interviewer
What’s a comptometer?
Molly Greenacre
It’s an adding-up machine.
Interviewer
What did you do after you left school?
Molly Greenacre
I had to work on the land at Bailey’s.
I left at 14 and it was jolly hard work as I was working alongside the land army girls, and we all had to do the same thing, but the weather was terrible in the winter, and those girls had all the right equipment for the job, they had big coats, jerseys, shirts, trousers, boots, big thick socks, hats and everything, and I had to buy mine. My little dungarees, that’s all I could have, they weren't very thick, but we had the same money, and we had to do the same job, and I always think when they try to boost the land army girls, it was not a nice job.
It was jolly hard. I was pulling sugar beet in the snow, it was very hard.
