大象传媒

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We lived in Hornchuch, Essex and I was seven when World War Two was declared.

It was a sunny day that Sunday and I can remember the sun coming through our French doors and my mother crying when Mr. Chamberlain made his speech over the radio, while my father sat in his chair not saying very much. We went almost straight away in our car to see my grandmother at Manor Park and while there we heard the siren going, the now famous false alarm.

Our house was less than a mile from Hornchurch aerodrome, which was one of the Battle of Britain fighter stations and there were a lot of raids on the airfield. Perhaps fortunately, between us and the airfield a small housing estate had been planned before the war and only the light coloured concrete roads had been laid, which the Germans thought were runways, so quite a few bombs landed there or on the fields nearby.

There was one incident which caused quite a bit of hilarity locally when the Home Guard all ran to capture a parachutist who escaped from a damaged plane. As he came down they shot the poor man in the ankle, only to find he was one of ours.

For quite a few weeks during that period we slept in our Anderson shelter which I thought was fun but gave my mother dreadful lumbago because of the condensation and dampness. Some nights we sat up because our neighbours, a widow and three grown up daughters, shared our shelter as theirs kept flooding with water. They had a very big gun at the airfield and I can remember that it was quite comforting to hear that big 鈥渨ump鈥� every time it was fired 鈥� it was much louder than other guns there. During the Blitz, I can remember looking towards London at night, which was about fifteen miles away, and seeing a huge orange glow.
Whenever there was a dog fight overhead, the boys next door used to dance on top of their shelter, while their father stayed in the shelter and called to them to get down.

They never did get down, of course.

It was great fun to go over the fields after raids to where a German plane had been shot down and scrounge pieces of shrapnel 鈥� I had a small nameplate from the dashboard of one, which was a great treasure.

I can never remember being frightened during those years, even when the dread V1 and V2 bombs came and our area was quite heavily targeted. I think this was a tribute to my parents who must have been very scared many times but never showed it to me. We lost our roof through bomb blast and had our windows blown out three times during the war years.

I know my father was very concerned during the 1940-41 period when England seemed so vulnerable but he had great faith in Mr. Churchill. A lot has been said about Churchill鈥檚 bad decisions earlier in his career, particularly regarding Gallipoli.

My father was at Gallipoli in World War One, in the Essex Regiment and he never bore any grudge against Churchill 鈥� he always seemed to admire him during World War Two and feel that he was perhaps our only hope in keeping everyone鈥檚 morale.
In the summer of 1944 the flying bombs started and my parents thought the best thing was for us to sleep downstairs in our front room. They turned the settee and an armchair to face the window and we slept behind on mattresses so that we would be protected from flying glass. This didn鈥檛 last long as my mother got fed up with not sleeping in a proper bed so we moved back upstairs.

We lived near a corner and the big event I remember more clearly than anything was in September 1944 when a damaged flying bomb, a V1, limped lower and lower, then hit houses at the back and at a right angle to ours. It happened in the middle of the night and I was awakened by this dreadful explosion to see that apparently the whole world had turned bright red. The small fireplace in my bedroom had blown out and was lying across my bed over my legs and the windows had completely gone. My bed was full of glass. I heard my father call out to me and then swear very loudly, a thing he rarely did. He had got out of bed and pushed his feet into his slippers and they were full of glass, which was strange as their room was at the front of the house, away from the blast, and his side of the bed was farthest from the window. All the windows in the house were blown out and yet none of us had the smallest scratch.

Our neighbours came round with their dog, a large Airedale, and we all sat in the front room drinking tea. Today we would have said to be 鈥業n a state of shock鈥�, but then everyone just got on with things. After a while our neighbour from the other side came round the bay and put his head through the window frame to ask if we were all O.K. Rex, the Airedale, took a flying leap at him and we heard Mr. Curties running for his life. We just sat and laughed hysterically, even though the poor man might have had his nose bitten off. My father afterwards apologised to Mr. Curties for our thoughtlessness.

But several people were killed by that bomb and their houses totally destroyed, so we were extremely lucky.

What excitement when VE Day finally came. We went up to London and were lucky enough to see Mr. Churchill sitting on the back of an open car on Horseguards Parade. I was surprised how fair skinned and freckly he was. Later we walked on to Buckingham Palace and saw the King and Queen come out on the balcony.

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