大象传媒

Peter Foweraker (U3A Callington)- Memories from WW2. Story one

OUR CHICKEN RUN!

My name is Peter Foweraker and I was born in 1930. When war was declared in September 1939 I was nearly nine years of age. I was then evacuated but came back to London in the early forties, to Poplar in the East End of London where they had had a lot of serious air raids. I moved around three schools in about six weeks, all of which were eventually bombed. Then one night, a Saturday night, the East End of London especially the Dock area had very bad bombing raids. We were in our garden shelter and my father was the chief warden in the area. My father arrived and said, 鈥淵ou鈥檒l have to get out of this shelter, there鈥檚 a delayed action bomb in the gardens behind鈥�. We all moved out of the shelter and went up the road to a firm called Kitsons, who had a big shelter inside their building, that was made for their office staff and workers at the factory. It was built of a steel frame and covered with bags of asbestos. We sat there, for what must have been two or three hours, before this bomb exploded, pushing the door open, (which was approximately a foot thick), and leaving us all sitting there completely covered in asbestos dust! Half an hour later my father came back into the shelter, and he said that they had found another hole two doors away from us so we would have to move out again, and the only shelter we could go to was a street shelter. In those days people used them as urinals and they smelt terrible, but we stayed there right until the morning.

We then went back to see our house, which, looking at it from the front seemed in quite good condition. It was a big house as my mother used to run a boarding house for people from the local variety theatre. We went in the front door and saw that a window from one of the lower front rooms was broken, and when we went through to the back all the house was intact, but, when we got out into the garden, there was a split in the back of the house, starting just under the roof, about four foot wide, coming down the passage and stair area of the house. We started to look around to see what had happened and had a look at our Anderson shelter in the garden, and although it looked very good from the outside, when we looked down into it, the concrete floor which was over six inches thick, was broken in half and had smashed all the benches on each side of the shelter, so probably had we been in it we would have had our legs broken, or a lot worse!

When we went down to the end of the garden, where my dad used to keep six chickens, we saw that the wall had collapsed onto the run along the back and killed five of the chickens. When we looked around the garden for the other one we couldn鈥檛 see it, but the coup at the end was still intact, so we opened it, and there was the chicken sitting on the perch, oven ready 鈥� or, in other words, no feathers! It鈥檚 a memory I have always carried around with me, seeing a chicken completely uninjured, except for no feathers!

The next day I found myself on a train coming down to Devon to stay with my Aunt. My family had to pack up everything in the house, and they finally moved to Devon six weeks later, where we rented a house for the duration of the War.

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