In the most terrifying moments of the Blitz, a radio reporter was clambering over rubble, the acrid stench of explosives and brick dust around him, the wailing of sirens in his ears.
He came across a Cockney woman, sweeping her front doorstep.
He looked at what had been the house behind her and there was nothing; just a mountain of pulverised bricks. She glanced up at him. "You ain't seen my bleedin' milkman, 'ave you, sonny?"
If anybody wants to know what the spirit of the people was like during the bombing of London, they only have to drop in for a cup of tea with Doris Blyde, in Parmelia, Western Australia.
Seventy-one-year-old Mrs. Blyde wrote to a British newspaper the other day, complaining that there was often an impression "that Bermondsey people were of no account."
'I was born and bred there - another "ignorant Cockney" and proud of it,' said Doris.
And she told me: 'We lived at Number Ten, in the Vine Street Buildings, in Tower Bridge road, my luv. Rats under the house, tuberculosis rife. The Bricklayers Arms was nearby, a library on the corner and The Canterbury Tales made out in a mosaic, I used to run my finger over as a child.
'I went back with my sons to have a look on my 70th. birthday last year and I could have cried. It was all one hell of a mess. We were poor people, but we were clean.'
When Doris and her baby were caught upstairs as the warning sirens rang out, she sometimes didn't make it down to the shelter. 'I would fetch two blankets, fold one up and lay him on it and then pull the other blanket around us. It was BANG! BANG! BANG! all night long and I said to myself: "If I come out of this alive I've got nothing else to ever worry about."
'And I haven't, my luv. I remember flames coming up the passage and someone turned the wireless up full blast with Glen Miller and his orchestra playing. I would sing to it as I lay there and the whole place shook.
'When one raid was over I heard they had hit the Ship and Shovel. They had been dancing in there during the blackout.'
Migrated since 1964, her husband gone the past 10 years, she must miss the Cockney fun? Did she get together with others in Perth - Australia's biggest concentration of British migrants - for a knees-up?
'One thing you must understand about Cockney people, my luv, is that they are independent. I don't need to mix. I have a quiet life. I paint and mess about in my home and I read. And yes, I remember...
'I remember the shame of the dole and men not being able to get work. Women would wheel their prams down to the bun house to get a loaf of bread. We had food tickets and chits for the bus.
'And stress. I recall tall, strong dockers, coming away heartbroken from the wharves where they had tried to get a day's work. There wasn't the attitude to the dole that there is today. They hated it.'
Oh, and there was the march by the Fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, and his blackshirts through Bermondsey. 'We built a barricade,' remembers Doris as though it was yesterday, 'near St. Georges Church at the beginning of Long Lane.' Mosley had shrewdly stepped up the drama of his public meetings, addressing up to 50,000 people at a time, urging hate and action.
'It was a Sunday morning and we didn't enjoy others trespassing on what was ours so we decided to do something about it. Bermondsey people are good-hearted and generous; but if we have to fight, we fight tooth and nail. I was 13 and me and my mates ran up and pelted their mob. (My Mum and Dad would kill me if they knew!)
'We were having this punch-up when the mounted police charged with batons and it was all over.'
Thirty years ago Doris, her husband and two children sailed out to Australia. They had 20 pounds in their pockets, two cabin trunks down in the hold and two suitcases in their cramped cabin.
'We landed in Sydney on the Monday and my husband went to work on the Tuesday. I got a job too, and put every coin we could save into a small farm on the outskirts of Sydney. Coming from London we'd always dreamed of living in the country. We put down a deposit on five acres and roughed it to buy that place. We didn't have it on a plate, I can tell you.
'Today it's a suburb of Sydney and all the posh nobs live there.'
Pouring the tea, Doris will tell you what life on both sides of the world has taught her. 'To be loving and friendly; to know how to stand up for what is right.
'And to be democratic. That means that even though I am a Royalist, you have the right to say I am wrong in my beliefs and I can say the same about yours.
'To know that every man is equal, whatever the colour of his skin. To care about honesty, decency and fraternity.
'I grew up in a family that was often starving. But my Dad would say: "What you don't have, my girl, you don't need."'
