Cpl Ralph Goode (Lilydale), 2nd Field Ambulance: On leave in England. In a letter to his mother in Lilydale –‘We came up to London on Monday night intending to go from Surrey to Scotland but met a couple of pals who were going up the next night so we decided to go up with them, and that was how we got in the Air Raid the next night.
It was one of the funniest nights I’ve seen, crowded streets one minute and a few minutes – nobody to be seen except a few soldiers and policemen. Goodness knows where the people got to, the motto seems to be ‘any port in a storm’, or ‘any hole’s a good hole’. I don’t know how much I can say about it here, I know a policeman shoved us into a big restaurant and told us if he caught us out he would put us in the ‘clink’ so we had to put in two hours trying to amuse half hysterical women and howling kids. Several more Australians and French and I got the kiddies together and we played games and danced with them and I think we did a bit of good cos we had the women laughing at our antics. A lot of them forgot there was a raid on till a couple of bombs fell near and that was the end of it, they simply went to pieces after that’.
Gladys Gilbert (nee Stanton), Battersea, London: She later married a local soldier and came to Australia as a war bride. In an interview undertaken in 1994 –‘With the war being on, all the lighting in the street was blackened and you only had a little glimmer because they’d painted around the globes you see. Then they’d have the searchlights going and if there were any Taubes over they’d fire and they were doing that all over London. You’d look up with the searchlights and you’d see the planes and when they used to drop the bombs, we’d count them; they carried eight bombs each, and we’d count all the explosions up to eight then we knew they’d be finished’.