Memories of the late Flo Fitzgerald, speaking in November 2004, aged 102

"On the day of the May raid - 10 o'clock at night - I had been sitting, making a pair of shorts out of an army blanket for my young son to go to Mass in the morning. You see my coupons had run out. I thought, it's a lovely evening; I'll go for a little walk. I remember getting as far as the fish and chip shop that we used to call 'Suffy's' (I think it was really 'Sophy's). And people started pulling me inside the shop and wouldn't let me out. I could see the soldiers running beside Wards shop and I thought, Oh, they've had a pint of beer and are playing silly b's, but it was the German planes. They had apparently gone to bomb Lowestoft but had come up against the barrage balloons, so they came to dump their bombs on us instead. Quite a few died there, including a little friend of my son's. When I got home the house was down and my son had been carted round to the first-aid centre to have glass splinters removed. He had been running around looking for his sister and all the time I had been trapped in the fish shop."