大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CVS on behalf of Diana Taylor and has been added to the site with her permission. Diana Taylor fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born during Dunkirk,in May 1940. My father was an ARP. This meant that as soon as the air raid sirens started, he had to rescue people from burning buildings. The patch he was responsible for was the area around St Paul's Cathedral,an intense area for bombings. People don't recognise what ARPs did, for London in particular.

At times my father wasn't home for about 6 weeks. My mother started to get a bit fed up with this, as we were living in Sanderstead, in the middle of Biggin Hill, Croydon and Kenley No.1 fighter station -one ofthe most bombed areas of London. So in 1944 she decided she wanted to get a job herself,and we went to live in Somerset where she went to work as a maid in a hotel in Somerset. I don't think my mother was that good at her job, as I always remember her taking me off for long walks with our dog! But this was the only alternative to being evacuated. We would go back to London for short periods.

At the end of the war, my mother sold the house in Sanderstead, and we went to live with my grandmother in Palmers Green,North London for a short time. Then my father got a job on the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg,South Africa, where we stayed ever since.

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