Joyce Doolin was eleven when war was declared in September
1939. She lived with her parents Charles Vincent and Ruth
Victoria Doolin in Mayfield Avenue. She had an older sister,
Nora who was 16 and a younger brother, Leslie who was 6,
another brother Michael was born in 1941. In June 1940,
along with many other Dover school children, Joyce was evacuated
to South Wales:
“I was evacuated with Barton
Road School. My mother agreed to us going on the understanding
that we would be kept together. Mum thought I would keep
an eye on Leslie, my seven-year old brother. As it turned
out, I went to Ynysddu and my brother went to another village,
Blackwood!
I had a very good billet with an old
gentleman and his daughter, but my brother was in a very
rough place where the woman had a son the same age as Leslie.
My brother was made to do all sorts of work. He hadn't been
there long before the woman looking after him wrote to Mum
and said that all his clothes had been stolen from the washing
line, and that Mum would have to send more. She had taken
my brother’s clothes for her own son.
Anyway. Mum came down to Wales to take
Leslie home and there was no way I was going to stay if
he went home, so Mum took us both back with her. We had
been in Wales for just six weeks! When we got back, Mum
sent us out to Uncle Arthur Nelson in Mill Lane, Nonington,
which was a much safer place than Dover at that time. I
remember helping the Land Girls with the harvest that year,
and also going hop-picking to earn money for a bicycle.
We went home to Dover for Christmas
- and stayed. In May 1943, our house at 128 Mayfield Avenue
was hit by a bomb and we were all buried in the debris but
nobody was hurt. We had lost everything, but we had survived.”
The bombing occurred in the early hours of
Saturday 22 May 1943. The air raid sirens sounded just before
2.30 a.m. A cluster of small calibre bombs was dropped demolishing
seven houses in Mayfield Avenue and extensively damaging others
in the vicinity. There were four fatal casualties, one seriously
injured and eleven slightly.
At No. 126, Charles and Louisa Chapman, and
their seventeen-year-old daughter Doris, were killed, while
the other daughter was seriously injured. Forty-nine-year-old
Ivy Fussell, a laundry worker, was found dead at No. 118.
In another badly wrecked house fifteen-year-old Joyce Doolin
was trapped in her bed by a fallen rafter which pinned her
legs. She was unable to move. While the rescue teams toiled
among the rubble, War Reserve Constable Minter remained with
the her for two hours and prevented more rubble falling on
the girl. Joyce was eventually released and only then did
the constable come out of the tunnel. He was taken to hospital
in a collapsed state. A total of thirteen were hospitalized.
So severe was the damage that eventually fourteen houses were
taken down by the authorities.
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