大象传媒

When war broke out I was an eighteen year old working for Lloyds Insurance Brokers at St. Catherine Dock House by Tower Bridge in London. The previous month, August 1939, they were sandbagging the Town Hall and excavating for shelters in the park and the office windows were painted over. We were sent home from work, so I helped fill sandbags in West Ham Park. War was declared on the 3rd September, and I went up to the City to work on the 6th. The next day the Accounts Department went to Wisborough Green.
I was in a reserved occupation and became a firewatcher. My father was a bus driver with London Transport, so we couldn't be evacuated, but he was transporting children to the railway stations for evacuation. During the Blitz we never knew where he was, we just knew he was somewhere driving between Wanstead Flats and Camberwell Green. Early on in the Blitz he was coming along Commercial Road and he realised this enemy plane was targeting his bus, so he stopped suddenly under the railway arch and the bomb came down just ahead of him.

In May 1940 we got cards telling us that if we were evacuated we were going to Pinewood Studios. at about the same time we got our gas masks. In June we put in the Anderson shelter in the garden. In August the raids started. The shelters became a home to many large spiders. I remember taking off my shoe to bang them against the tin side of the shelter on more than one occasion!

I remember standing in the back garden with all these German planes coming over, like little moths in the sky, coming up the river to West Ham. Their target was the Docks and the warehouses at the side of the river. These were daylight raids. That sets the fires going. It was terrible to see it all aflame.
There were hundreds of enemy planes and a handful of Spitfires or Hurrcanes harrying them A neighbour in his back garden grabbed his garden fork ready for German parachutists to land.

By September 7th we had raids day and night and could see daylight through the ceiling. By October 12th we'd had two hundred air raids. On the 4th September the warehouse near Dock House was bombed and we had an oil bomb through the roof of the office. Fortunately this was at night. The strongroom doors were blasted open and all the policy documents damaged. We moved to another office in Lime Street and it was from those offices that we used to see the warning signal go up on top of Cunard House, warning us of doodlebugs heading in our direction.
I remember, one day, I walked from West Ham to the City (around five miles) because there was no transport. En route, there was a raid and I had to take shelter. I got to the office at around three o'clock. They were only too glad to see me!
Another time the office just across the walkway had been bombed and we could see the red-hot safe which had fallen through to the cellars. They told as later to evacuate because there was an unexploded bomb there.

In January 1944 we had the worst raids since the Blitz, which was when the doodlebugs started. My father was firewatching at the bus garage at Upton Park.
The doodlebugs would come over half a dozen at once across the sky, and they'd cut out at different times. By June, just after D-Day, we were sleeping in the shelter once again.
I was walking to my office from the train station, a doodlebug landed in Middlesex Street. I was by Seething Lane church when it landed. I hugged the wall and the windows blew out from the office windows opposite, just missing me. Not a scratch!

In October/November 1944 our home in Liddington Road was blasted again by a V2 and rain was running down the stairs. In January 1945 we were still

By VE Day our house was repaired and I remember hearing Churchill on the radio telling us war was over in Europe. We were thankful it was over and we'd survived as a family.

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