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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