大象传媒

I lost my mother, brother and sister in the Blitz. I was 10 at the time. We lived in a flat in Sutton Trust in Delgarno Gardens, North Kensington. My older brother John and I had been evacuated to Cornwall at the outbreak of war but the rest of them had stayed in London. My brother Fred was 6 so he was too young to be evacuated and my sister Mary and brother Harry were 18 and 21.

On September 18th 1940, a bomb hit our house. It caught one side of the flat hitting the bedroom where my mother, Mary and Fred were at the time. Because my father and elder brother were on the other side of the flat, they were ok.

We found out about it because Dad sent a letter to the woman we were staying with in Cornwall. We were sat down at lunch and told. It was awful. We didn鈥檛 go home straight away. My father wanted to sort out everything first so we only came back after the funeral about a month later. The mortuary was also blown up by a bomb, so their remains all ended up being buried in one coffin together.

After that my brother and I stayed in London. We used to sleep in the Anderson shelter which was a big hole dug in the garden and covered over. We slept there every night for three years. This is because there were sirens every night.

Sometimes we used to stand outside in the garden and watch the dogs fighting in the air above. It seemed very exciting to me. Other aircraft came across too like the V2 鈥攖he doodlebug. You could see the flame on top. When the flame went out, you knew the bomb was being dropped but you didn鈥檛 know where. That was very scary indeed, never knowing where the bomb would hit.

I remember there were about four or five bombs dropped in the Kensington area. There was a big one in Shepherds Bush by the big Silver Cinema. The building was totally destroyed but luckily it was empty that night. And there was another bomb a couple of blocks away from our flat and there were two people killed in that one.

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