大象传媒

Mr Chamberlain had just informed us that war had been declared, when the air raid siren sounded (a practice warning, apparantly, but we didn't know that). As we were deciding whether to make a dash for the shelter, we noticed our next-door neighbours were drawing their blackout curtains - on that sunny Sunday morning - and family humour came to the fore even in that dire circumstance, so we all fell about laughing. If the Germans really were on their way to bomb London we should have been helpless victims, I fear. Fortunately the "All Clear" sounded quite soon afterwards.
Our suberban semi had a garden, so we were given an Anderson shelter which my Dad erected in a great pit which he dug under our apple tree. Typically, he grew flowers over the top of it, cornflowers, snapdragons and nasurtiums. Jimmy and I and the girls next dor used it as a playroom during the summer days of 1940, but when the London Blitz began my mother, Jimmy and I slept there every night. There were double bunks each side and a small table which held a nighlight in a blue glass pot and Mum's ebony crucifix. A very thick curtain closed the entrance. On the whole Jimmy and I slept quite well, despite the fact that a mobile Ack-Ack gun ran along the tracks of our railway line, so the whistles, thuds and crashes of bombs were argmented by the earsplitting bangs of nearby shellfire. One extremely noisy night, the curtain was pulled aside and the cheerful face of my Dad in his blue tin helmet was framed in the opening. He was a Metropolitan police constable and was on duty of course, but often found his "beat" took him past our house during an air raid. "Have a look at this!" he called, grinning. Mum's eyes remained closed, her lips moving in prayer,her rosary beads slipping through her fingers, but Jimmy and I scrambled to look out from our hole in the ground - and saw a firework display to beat all firework displays. It could have been a stage set, searchlights sweeping the sky and intersecting, their beams sometimes capturing an aeroplane - like a fly first of all, then an exploding star spiralling slowly downwards; great sunbursts of shells, eruptions of flames and smoke, the red glow in the sky all round the horizon - London was burning. There was the horrible low throbbing of the bombers, the buzz and rattle of our fighter planes, shattering glass and falling bricks, the distant clanging of fire engines and ambulances. It's strange to recall not feeling at all frightened - the scene was awesome but fascinating, unforgettable.

Half the school playingfield had been dug up for air raid shelters. When the siren went off, the class had to form up and walk briskly (not run) to its assigned shelter. Work continued as far as possible, so, if we'd been in the middle of a lesson we weren't too keen on (maths for instance), the trick was to somehow find ourselves in the wrong shelter where, with luck, a more enjoyable lesson was in progress. This probably explains why I failed mathematics later in the School Certificate.

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