大象传媒

I spent the war living in Oxford, where my Father was the Chief Inspector on the torpedoes being made at Morris motors and the Standard Motor Company in Coventry. Of course, as he was a young man, with a young family, I was six the year the War started! Also the job was very secret, he was actually in the Admiralty, people began to talk!! I remember my mother regularly picking up the Post at the door and crying at the bit of white chicken feather enclosed within, this went on for all of the War and we just got used to it! The night Coventry Cathedral was bombed, I remember very clearly as my Father was that week in Coventry working at Standards and was staying in a boarding house just three doors from the Cathredral.
We stayed up all night watching the horizon which was lit up with bright lights and we could hear the German bombers going over Oxford towards Coventry and believe me it was some sight! My Mother was in a panic, we didn't know that Coventry Cathedral had been hit until two days afterwards but we new that something pretty big had been bombed and quite naturally thought it was Standards and that my Dad was possibly a goner!
Three days later he arrived home, he had been working through the night at the time the Cathedral was bombed, his digs had been flattenned, luckily all the guests had been down in the cellar. When my Dad got home the rescuers had not found the entrance to the cellar but Dad had been able to show them where it was and every one was got out safely.
A fortnight later because it had all been so traumatic my Dad took us all, on the train, to Coventry, for two days and we went round the Cathedral. Pathways had been made around the rubble and it was still smoking and in places it was still smouldering, my Mother and I found amongst the rubble to ancient silver Nails, which we took home and cleaned, she had tjem arranged as a cross and mounted in a frame. They looked wonderful, I asked if I could have them when she died, to which she agreed, but by the time she died in 1982 they had disappeared from her house and I have never found out where they went. Someone, somewhere owns them and there can't be that many silver nails around, can there?
We never had a Bomb on Oxford but there was I believe one at kidlington, a stay one. From where we lived we could see the sky aflame at night when London was Bombed as well as Coventry, we were always aware that we could have it happen to us.
At the end of the war, when my Father was being discharged from the Admiralty, approx. 1947. He had the job of destroying all the secret Papers, he had to burn them, one copy of each was going into the archives. After much discussion my Mother and Father decided that as I had experienced so much with them, that they would tell me one particular story. At the height of the War, all the torpedoes had to be transported by Rail from Oxford and Coventry to Portsmouth or Southampton, where they were then shipped to wherever was there destination. One was sent & was apparently duff, so was instantly sent back to Oxford, by Rail, my Father as Chief Inspector, got on to the back of it and fiddled around with the switches and found to his consternation that it was charged and ready to go OFF! He was horrified and unable to move, the Army had to called for and he had to sit there with his finger on the button until they arrived, a total of some three hours, had the torpedo gone off it would have taken the whole of Oxford, or lets say, a good part of it, with it!! My Father was off work for a week feeling decidedly off colour and they still recieved their usual number of white feathers!!

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