Memories of the War - Patricia Pedder & Family

I was born in July 1937 and spent the first three years of my life in a green and white clapboard house on my Grandfather and Grandmother's land at the top of Vicarage Hill, Benfleet, which was a short distance from the Boyce Hill Golf Course. I was told that in the early years of the War, a bomb fell on the golf course which had a searchlight operating from it, and this caused all the glass windows to cave in. My brother aged eight had a near escape in bed as the glass fell on his covers. After this happened, my parents (Bertha and Leslie Watts) moved to the bottom of Essex Way where I grew up with my brother.

My cousin, Ted, who lived in the farmhouse on the left going down Essex Way hill told me recently that one of my uncles climbed up a tree near the bottom of Essex Way to remove a parachute which was attached to a bomb. His mother and several neighbours used the silk to make underwear. Another time a bomb was dropped in the rabbit warren on the left going up Essex Way. The police disposal team told Ted's family to open all their windows before the bomb was dismantled. His cottage was ok, but several houses in Vicarage Hill lost their windows at the time of the bomb being disarmed.

When leaving the Downs and going towards Leigh we had what we called a spinney and when we were children discovered an underground cave which was used by the ARP during the war years. It made a good camp!

My father was too old for the Second World War but served in the 1914-18 war. He was an air raid warden and made sure all the blackout rules were observed in the houses at the bottom of Essex Way. My brother took great delight in watching the dog fights in the sky from the bungalow which was high up in Essex Way.

In Benfleet Creek was a shipyard called Benfleet Slipway where boats were made for use in the War and many times they were targeted by enemy aircraft. Luckily Benfleet Slipway survived throughout the War and only closed in the early fifties. My father and his brother worked there until closure.

I remember sleeping under the iron bedstead on a mattress in a back bedroom every night, instead of going into the Anderson shelter at the back of the garden under high trees, mainly because the shelter was a dugout and would fill up quickly with water and become uninhabitable, especially as we were at the foot of the hill in Essex Way.