大象传媒

My name is Thomas Poole. I was born in 1931 and was eight years old when the war began. I lived in Bridge Street, Writtle, with my Dad Fred, Mum Cis, and my twin brothers Donald and David.
The start of the war seemed funny to me, everything changed. You couldn鈥檛 do this or that and you could not get sweets as they went on ration like everything else.
We all had to get fitted with gas masks, uncomfortable smelly things.

Things were not too bad until the air raids started, it scared us very much.
We did not have a shelter, so we had to get under the stairs. There were four of us and Mrs Blanks and the two daughters from next door.
During the day was not so bad sometimes while we were at school we had to spend hours in the air raid shelters, but at night when the sirens went you would not be able to get much sleep. Our house had a tin roof on the kitchen, and along the road from us in a field were 3.7 Finty air guns, and when they started you could hear bits rattle on the tin roof.

There used to be about eight children in our street and nobody had a shelter. Then our luck changed, they came out with what they called a table, like a big steel table about 10 x 5 but only Mrs Beven down the road had a room big enough to take it. So when the siren went we all had to run down the road to her house.

Where Writtle is seemed to be on the bombers line to London, but we had a lot of bombs around us as there were three big factories about two and half miles from us Marconi, Hoffmans,Cromptons.
My Dad worked in one of these factories 鈥淐romptons鈥� and he had a part time job there as a plane spotter. They had a tall chimney, which they had to go up, and spot the planes coming over.
My Mum used to do washing for the soldiers billeted in our street. And as my brothers were only three, mum used to work out in the fields potato and pea picking. One day when the people were coming home, we had a German plane machine gun the road. I don鈥檛 think any one was hurt, but the garage down the road was peppered with bullets.
Then came the doodle bugs, they used to frighten you. You would be waiting for them to stop and had no idea where they would drop.
Then there were rockets. One teatime, we had just started tea about 6, o鈥檆lock, when my dad shouted 鈥淟ook out鈥� how he knew what was coming I will never know. But there was a big bang. A rocket had dropped just down the road and we got the full blast from it. The roof was blown off, where we were sitting the walls just caved in, Mums dresser with all the plates and cups on came across the room. The windows were blown in and the fire blown out. But we were very lucky as no one was hurt, just scared stiff. We lived in that house with a tilt over the roof for a long time, then during the last year of the war we moved into a council house we where my mum and brother stayed for over fifty years.

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