大象传媒

I was in my early teens in the Second World War and lived all the time in East London, so I went right through the Blitz, I wasn鈥檛 evacuated. I spent something like 90 nights in an Anderson shelter, consecutively. Fortunately, we weren鈥檛 bombed out but we got knocked about quite a bit.

An exhibit I have seen here that interests me is an unexploded incendiary bomb. And it reminds me that occasionally, as boys, we used to find incendiary bombs that hadn鈥檛 gone off. I am horrified now to think that we used to put them in a vice and unscrew the cap and get the powder out which we could then wrap up in little bits of paper and make little bombs out of them. How we didn鈥檛 get one go up in our face I don鈥檛 know.

The Anderson Shelter, it looks a lot drier than it was because it was always a bit damp. After a while we got some bunks that we could put in half way up, it doesn鈥檛 show the angled framework around this that you could put the bunks on. You could get four people in there sleeping. I remember my father rigged up an electric light from the house. How we didn鈥檛 get electrocuted I don鈥檛 know. We were fairly well off to have an electric light; he also built steps so we could get down into it. They were very good protection really, although I did see one that had had a direct hit from a bomb and the whole family of six had been killed inside. That was on September 6th, the day that is now honoured as the Battle of Britain day, when we had intensive raids over London and that happened nearby where I lived.

It was usually extremely boring because there wasn鈥檛 a raid going on all the time. The air raid sirens had gone off and lasted all the night but the planes came over in sort of waves and so for long periods of time there was just nothing to do really.

We didn鈥檛 have portable wirelesses like you have now, transistors and so on. So it was really rather boring but with the aid of electric light we could read and that kind of thing. Every now and again, when it got a bit quiet, either my mother or father would go in and make some tea and then if I we heard something coming, we all got terribly anxious that they should come out again quickly and called for them. We were fairly lucky in that although many houses around were bombed and we had things like interior walls blow down and slates off and windows smashed, we were never actually bombed out, we never had to leave our house There were some pretty horrific sights around.

I remember one morning going out after a raid in March 1941. I went to a house we used to live in nearby and that had been hit by an aerial mine; these were mines that came down on parachute and when they landed on the ground they blew everything, they didn鈥檛 make a whole so much, but they just blew all the houses around. Where I had lived had been completed flattened to the ground and they were still bringing people out of the wreckage.
That was a rally quite terrible sight. We had only move from there about a year before the war so in a way we were lucky to get away.

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