Jane Sheridan

I got a call on the telephone yesterday while I was on duty to say that George had been shot down but that he was alive and in no danger. However, he had been injured. I wanted to go and see him. Violet was able to take over my shift and our Commanding Officer let me head off to Orpington General Hospital where George had been taken.

September 7, just two days ago, was the most shocking day of my time here at Dunkirk. Perhaps it was the most shocking day of my life, for two quite different reasons. I was sat at my screen in the early afternoon after a quiet morning. The weather outside was bright and warm. The bomb attacks on airfields across the south-east over the previous ten days had been relentless and we were surprised when there was nothing showing up on the screens in the morning. But then at just before 4pm I saw the tell-tale signs of enemy aircraft as blips on my receiver. Very soon I could see that this was no ordinary build-up of planes, either, but the most enormous concentration of aircraft I had ever seen.

George came to see me yesterday and now, as I write this, he’s soundly asleep in my bed. I’m quite certain that he could sleep for days. He was so tired when he arrived that I barely recognised him. He looked as though he had bruises under his eyes but it was simply dark rings from too much flying. His eyes too looked distant and I wondered whether it was not just tiredness but whether he had seen things that I will never see and never wish to see.

The blips on the radar screen are coming in so thick and fast now that they’re like vast plagues of locusts or ants. It reminds me of being at home as a child when in the summer, on warm days like many we’ve had this summer, entire armies of flying ants would emerge from nests in the ground and swarm all over the place and land on my clothes and get tangled in my hair. It doesn’t matter how many you might kill; more will emerge from the holes in the ground; an unending stream of flying ants.

It has been an almighty week of up to 250 enemy planes at one time filling my screen and the sudden feeling that the war is actually HERE, rather than over the Channel or in the air alone, after the radar station was bombed on August 12. I was secure in the well-protected bunker, our ‘tomb for the living’, when the bombs hit and though I felt them through every bone, muscle and nerve of my body, I was safe. The station even remained operational throughout the attack and we could see more enemy aircraft flooding in later on in the day.