大象传媒

I was 6yrs old when the war started, the 4th child of 13. We had to walk 2 1/2 miles each way to school across farmland. As we often went without breakfast we were nearly always so hungry that I would pick carrots and turnips out of the ground, brush the earth off and eat them as we walked. Bread and lard was a common meal, sometimes with sugar sprinkled on top.
We slept five to a bed - top to toe - and I used to shin down the drainpipe onto the shed roof and go out and meet my friends. I got back in the house the same way, usually about 1am. Once, I had stepped onto some broken glass and cut my foot. Next day I got a good telling off for putting blood on the mattress; never mind my foot!
I remember one day when the baker's van was delivering next door and in the back was a big slab cake. I shinned down the drainpipe, took the cake, hid it in the air raid shelter and covered it with a sack. The baker complained to my mother that I had stolen his cake but she denied this, saying that I was in bed. She called me down, luckily I was back in the bedroom by this time, and of course I claimed to have been in bed all along. When I went to get a piece of the cake the next morning to take to school it was covered in cockroaches. I never did get to eat that cake. My dad came home on leave and found out that I had been playing truant, so he took me to school, sat me at my desk and left me there. When he got home though there I was sitting in the armchair waiting for him!
Those war years were very hard and we were very poor, but I had a good childhood, full of laughter. Looking back I think I was just like the Artful Dodger - very streetwise at a very young age.

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