Pensioner Sylvia Sharpe, 83, recalls her lucky escape in the Southampton Blitz during the Second World War...

SEPTEMBER 1940 - it was the time that Hitler thought he was going to wipe out the Supermarine Aviation Works in Southampton, which produced the desperately-needed Spitfire fighter planes.

I was there - three storeys up in the wages department. When we heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the guns, I wondered: "What is that?"

We started scrambling out down the spiral stairs to the air raid shelters.

Thank God I didn't get far - I laid down by the railway track in stinging nettles and covered my head with my cycle cap.

I heard a tittering noise and looked up to see about 150 sparrows flying out over the railway, away from one of the works which had just been bombed.

The railway arch had been hit - along with the shelter which I usually went in.

I saw people with blood running down their faces coming out of the hangars. I can't remember what I did after that. But the bombers had hit a guy on the green - blown the officer's legs off.

Soldiers put him on a piece of corrugated iron as there were no ambulances available.

He died on the way to hospital, one of his men told me.

My father was at Thornycrofts. He told me how one minute a man was riding his bicycle along the road, then there were bricks flying and a bicycle going along on its own.

Although Thornycrofts was not often mentioned, they were building destroyers and one Saturday Dad - a first class boiler maker - was working on the outside of a ship when a bomb went right through the centre of it. There were men killed.

The second visit by Jerry, as we called the Germans, came on a Thursday. We were sent to a gas-proof building across the road from the Supermarine works. The wages money was still on the table waiting to be counted when that was it. They were upon us.

The table with all the money went up, the lights went out and the poor firemen came out from a steel shelter and went outside.

I stood under the arch of the exit door for support. I got outside to a beautiful blue sky to find one of our girls laying in the gutter.

The whole place in the centre of Woolston was a shambles.

Next day I went down over the green at Peartree and climbed over the smashed railway station - all the shops had gone. The smell of gas was bad.

I think it is time to have a memento - a Spitfire either at Woolston or on Spitfire Bridge - for the sake of everyone and all the wonderful work the Supermarine did.

Footnote: More than 100 people died during the two daylight bombing raids by the Luftwaffe on the factory and surrounding area in September, including some of the workers who, like Sylvia said, had run into a shelter beneath the railway embankment that took a direct hit.

Sylvia, now of Coppice Hill, Bishop's Waltham, ran the Barley Corn pub at Bishop's Waltham from 1964 to 1980 with her husband, Ken, who died 22 years ago. Her maiden name was Shephard.