BRITISH WOMEN BOMBED

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 June 1940, Page 10

BRITISH WOMEN BOMBED

17 NIGHTS RUNNING. LONDON, June 1. Two British women who went to France to work for the Y.M.C.A. and faced 17 consecutive nights of bombing raids said this week when they arrived back in Londbn: “We would not have missed it for the world.”

They are Miss Ruth W. Adeney, aged 27, and Miss Joan Wilson, aged 28. They were among the last British people to be evacuated from Boulogne. “Fortunately we were in a modern concrete building and to that we owe our lives,” said Miss Adeney. “During the 17 nights the sirens were so constant that we could not tell whether they meant a raid had started or finished, and for the most part we just stayed in bed.” On the last night they took refuge in a cellar and when they left their shelter next morning the houses on both sides were piles of ruins. “A memory that will live with me,” said Miss Adeney, “is of two nurses on the end of a quay and under con-1 slant bombing and machine-gunning, I calmly kneeling beside wounded men| and attending to them.” The capture of a German spy, in Belgian uniform, by an old farmer and his wife, was seen by the British women.

“The German tried to run away ‘when he was challenged,” said Miss I Wilson, “but the farmer tripped him up with his pitchfork. Then the wife jammed her milk pail on his head and together they dragged him off to a British post.” “If the people had only kept under cover when the German aeroplanes first flew over Boulogne there would not have been anything like so many casualties among them,” said Miss Patricia Moorhouse, who, since the beginning of the war with four other British women has been running a Y.M.C.A. canteen in the centre of Boulogne. “The first raid was on Sunday evening and lasted till early morning,” said Miss Moorhouse. “We did not realise they were coming till all the lights went out and the anti-, aircraft guns opened fire. ] “Policemen were blowing theirl whistles, but you could hardly hear! them for the gunfire. People, many’ of them half-dressed, came rushing out of the houses to see what was going on.

“Many of them were hit by shrapnel and splintered glass from windows, but many others still stood gazing up into the sky till the German aeroplanes flying low to 'get beneath the range of the guns, came in from the coast side of the town and machine-gunned the streets. Only then did the people rim for shelter. “The townspeople were wonderful to the refugees, doing what they could to help and comfort them, in spite of their own confusion and bewilderment. They gave them food, and provided rugs and blankets for those who had nowhere to sleep except in their cars dr on the quayside. “On the morning that we left hundreds of people were crowding into vessels at the quayside.”