Fate Visits St Mary's Church, Portsmouth

My mother told me several stories of being shot at by German aircraft, but the most shocking story was when she was a young girl walking by St Mary's Church, when the air raid siren went off. She ran towards the nearest shelter, which was in front of the church cemetery. When she got there she couldn't get in as there was a gentleman in a wheelchair taking the last place to fill the shelter, so being young she was told to run along to the next shelter along the road, which she did.

On hearing the all clear she walked back past the shelter she tried to get into to give the warden a piece of her mind, to find it wasn't there. It had taken a direct hit from a mine and the wheelchair from the gent who took the last place was suspended on a branch of a nearby tree. This is why there is now no cemetery at this church as all of the graves were exposed and mixed, so they were all re-intered and the headstones were placed along the walls of the churchyard.

I often wondered why these headstones were there as a child, and only found out by remarking about it to a friend one day, and she told me the story.

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