Remembering the blitz: 'I heard digging. Then there was a ray of light'

As part of our commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the blitz, Dorothy James recalls how a bomb fell on her London home
Dorothy James
Dorothy James: 'For a while there was bitterness towards the Germans. But you can't let grief destroy you.' Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

"Where shall we start?" I ask 86-year-old Dorothy James when we meet at the day centre she attends in Camden, close to King's Cross station in central London. "Well," she deadpans, "I would say start at the beginning." The beginning for her is not 1924, when she was born, but 17 October 1940, when the tenement house in which she lived with her family – in the very street in which she still lives today – was hit by a land mine, dropped down on a parachute.

"When land mines explode, they go down and then out," Dorothy explains. She was sheltering in the basement – her family lived above a sweet shop – with her parents, two sisters and brother. Her parents and sisters were killed instantly; her brother Teddy was trapped under rubble and his legs had to be amputated. Dorothy had blasted lungs, which have given her problems in later life, but was otherwise unscathed.

In a clear, unemotional voice, she recalls the moments after the land mine hit. "I could hear my sister moaning," she says. "She was at the back of me. It wasn't until afterwards that I was told what I could hear was the air coming out from her lungs. I was up on a cot bed by the fireplace. My mother kept budgerigars and she used to bring them down into the basement with us when there was an attack. They were flying around, and I remember trying to put one up the chimney breast.

"It seemed an awful long time [before we were rescued], and I could smell gas because the gas mains outside had been hit. I laid there and called to my brother. You could still hear the thump of explosions going off. I could hear them digging and banging, and the next thing I know there's a little ray of light where they've made a hole in the debris. The local priest was there and he said, 'Are you alright Dorothy?', and I said, 'Have you got a blanket? I've wet myself.'"

Dorothy had older siblings not living at home – her parents had had nine children – and her eldest brother Fred went to make the identification. "He only recognised my one sister by the earrings she had on," she says. "We asked, 'Why didn't you let us go to see them?', and he said, 'I wanted to spare you that.'" Her composure as she tells all this is astonishing. "I used to have nightmares for a while," she says, "and I found myself one day following someone I thought was my dad. He walked just like him. My father was terribly bow-legged because he'd fought in the Boer war and had had to ride horses."

Dorothy went to live with an aunt in Dunstable, but missed London. She came back and, when she was 17, joined the army, becoming a "predictor" based on Primrose Hill in north London, assessing the heights at which anti-aircraft fire should be directed. "I was getting my own back," she says. Even in her short time at Dunstable, she had worked in the General Motors armaments factory. I express surprise she was not given time to grieve: "You couldn't let yourself grieve," she says. "You could in your own way, but it didn't alter things. I know that's hard to say, but if you let it rule you, you'd never get over it."

At the age of 19 she married a soldier, and had a son and daughter. In 1949, she and her family moved back to the street in which her parents and sisters had been killed. Weren't there too many memories? "There are always memories," she says. "A lot of others moved out to the suburbs, but I don't think they were very happy."

Did she hate the Germans for killing her family? "For a while there was bitterness. I don't say hatred, but there was bitterness. But you can't let the grief destroy you. You either accept what's happened, or you carry a grudge around with you." A visit to Germany in the early 1960s with her brother Teddy proved a kind of reconciliation.

"My son was in the army, and we went to visit him in Münster when he was stationed there. It was Christmas time and snowing, and some deer came out of the woods near where they lived. It was lovely to tease my grandsons. I said, 'Oh look, he's about, Santa's about. They're his reindeers.'" She descends into giggles, then gathers herself. "You can't carry on a war your whole life. Well, some people can, but life's bad enough without you fouling it up with bitterness."