Community play isa moment in time

If Mary hadn’t made the fateful decision to leave the Whitehall Cinema in East Grinstead exactly when she did, she might never have lived to see her children grow up.

Five minutes later the bombs fell. More than a hundred people died as a quiet country town fell victim to the full horror of war on July 9 1943.

Mary’s daughter Angela and son Michael were the reasons she hurried home when the air raid warning came through. Others stayed - and never left.

“When the film came on, they put a warning up and the siren went,” says Angela. “My mother decided to go home, and so she left before the action started. She wouldn’t have realised until she got home how awful it had been.”

Angela’s current task is to help recreate some of the memories of that terrible day. She is playing her own mother in the East Grinstead community play which deals directly with the day the bombs dropped on the town.

“My mother was just anxious to get home to make sure we were all right. In the following days the enormity of it hit her. It was quite a small town in those days and everybody knew lots of people or were related to people who were killed or injured.

“A lot of those who were killed were in the cinema, and when some of the people managed to get out, the plane came back and machine-gunned them in the street. It was a chain of bombs that started at the cinema and went up London Road.

“The only theory is that fairly adjacent there was a line of army lorries parked. Whether the Germans thought that there was troop deployment in the area, I don’t know.

“I think she left the cinema perhaps five minutes before it happened. It was really bad. At the back of one of the shops there was a paint store where there were a lot of inflammables. There was a really bad fire. You had the collapse of the cinema. There was a glass-framed ballroom. There was damage and broken glass, and you had the fire. It was what you would call a multiple whammy.

“I was born in 1934. I was nine at the time. My brother was seven. I can’t remember anything at all except ‘Oh, it’s another raid’. We had a shelter in the house. We would have been put in there. We got used to raids and sirens. You just went to the shelter and waited for the all-clear. Mum came home and would check that we were alright.”

So many things added to the tragedy, not least the fact that it was a grotty day.

“It was particularly sad that on Fridays a lot of children would swim in the open air, but it was such a grotty day that they went to the cinema instead. Would you rather swim in the rain or go and see Hopalong Cassidy? There were quite a number of young people that died, sadly.”

Matters Of Chance, an epic tale with a cast of more than 80, will be staged from November 29-December 11 at Sackville School, Lewes Road, East Grinstead.

The £90,000 project is supported by the County, District and Town Councils, the Arts Council, Grassroots, Gatwick fund and others. A cast from West End musicals recently raised £5,000 for the project with a concert.

For more information about east Grinstead community play visit www.egplay.org.uk.

Tickets £12 adults, £8 children available from: East Grinstead Museum, Cantelupe Road, Bull Frog Music, 15 Ship Street, Wickenden’s Sweet Shop 11 High Street, Chequer Mead Arts Centre: 01342 302000 (normal booking charges apply).