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The big guns on Battery Point
Summary
Jenny Sainsbury remembers living near the big guns in wartime
Transcript
Our cottage was only 300 yds from the biggest gun of the gun emplacements on Battery Point, which was defending the entrance to Bristol Docks and Avonmouth Docks and I know there were two big guns there and the concrete is still there as they never dug up the concrete from where they put these guns. They used to test the guns and they didn’t give us warning when they were going to test it, it was always in the day and when they did the cups rattled on our dresser and we were frightened they would all drop and smash and of course we thought our hearts would drop out of our bodies. The other thing we were very aware of were the soldiers because the houses opposite us, there were five in a row, semi-detached and they were taken over by the government to house the soldiers and I think they just slept there but they had there mess-room in a very large house, behind our cottage right on the cliff edge and the soldiers, they came from all over England and Scotland and Wales and probably Northern Ireland and when we were children playing on the front lawn they would tease us and have jokes and goodness knows what and we used to mimic their accents, we developed an ear for it and I got quite good at it.
