大象传媒

This story was added to the People's War website by Pam Riding of Kirklees Libraries and on behalf of Mr Thompson and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
I'll begin in 1939 with the day of the outbreak of the Second World War. I remember my father dragging the radiogram outside so that people in the street could hear the speech from Downing Street. I hadn't realised till much later that people just didn't have radios. Anway he then started playing patriotic and military music-I remember the police turning up and subsequently, many years later I found he had actually been taken to court and prosecuted for causing a disturbance.
I was due to start school the succeeding week. I went to school the first day and then got taken home by a teacher at lunchtime because the school had been closed down. I was then seven before I went to school again.
My father's job was then taken outside London to the Devon/Somerset border and my mother, brother and myself were evacuated with him. We lived in the farmhouse and they had staff working in converted barns on the farm. Fortunately, we went for a few days holiday to the North Devon coast.Whilst we were there the farmhouse was bombed- we presumed it was an accident, but we don't know.
We returned to London, not to our original place at Strathleven Road, but to an area called Feltham which is near where London airport is now. He couldn't get his own house back as he had rented it out, so my father had to occupy the house that they had rented.Sometime later when the Battle of Britain bombing had started, my mother had a mental breakdown and was in hospital so my brother went to one aunt in the country and I went to another aunt. I lived with my aunt for two or three months but then she had to go to Cheltenham to look after some of her elderly in-laws so I was sent back to live with my father. We then lived in the caretaker's house of the place where my father worked which was great for a young lad because there were five floors that I could run up and down and lifts that I could go up and down in at weekends when there was nobody in the offices and typewriters all over the place. I remember having a great time.
One night I was asleep in the caretakers flat and there was a raid. I think there must have been a lull in the bombing otherwise we would have been down in the basement. The building next door got hit by incendiary bombs. The first thing I knew about this was the window near my bed smashing and the water from the firemens hoses coming in under tremendous pressure. The fire brigade were unable to save the building next door, so what they were doing was damping down the buildings either side of it to prevent the fire from spreading.
Shortly after that my father got moved again, to Northampton and again I don't really know what he was doing, but we did have a distant relative there who I went to live with. I was still there come D-Day and I can remember the gliders being towed over in masses, going over the countryside-the air seemed to be thick with them. Strangely, I've had a fascination with military gliders ever since them.
I think it was when we were in Northampton, that I eventually went back to school. I was miles behind everybody else, but it was just one of those things.
We did go back to Feltham to the house that my parents had rented and I returned to school. One of the treats after school would be to go, with my mother, the long way round home past the air park which had been taken over for the repair of Spitfires and Hurricaines where you could see all the aircraft lined up- all the ones which were in pieces or which were bomb damaged. If you were lucky there would be one or two of the repaired ones taking off but because the airfield was too small for them to land back on, they had to make sure they were alright. The house that my father rented backed onto Hounslow Heath which had been taken over for farmland. Down the side of that the Southern Railway had its largest marshalling yard and they were always trying to bomb that.
We had quite a way to walk to school and we didn't stay at school for lunches-mum would prepare a meal for us. One day, my brother and I were walking home for lunch and there was an aeroplane flying low. We had seen machine gunning before and suddenly we hear the machine guns start to go. Luckily we were near a bridge so we ran and hid near the parapet of the bridge. We crouched down against the wall-there were bullets flying all up the road. Three children were actually injured. We walked home and didn't even tell my mum. She said "where were you?", but we didn't think anything of it!

The Anderson shelters which people had at the bottom of their gardens weren't particularly successful and they started issuing the Morrison shelter which was made of plate steel. It was like a box and you had to have it downstairs-we had ours set up in the kitchen, with a mattress on top of it. You had rails round the side to stop rubble coming in.
One day, I think it must have been school holidays-it was certainly high summer, my brother and I were still in bed under this Anderson shelter. My mother was doing her washing with an old fashioned wash tub. There was an almighty bang and all the windows went-the door flew off the hinges. We were all all right and my mum was ok. The cat went mad and just about tore the front room curtains down! It wouldn't stop for about an hour it raced round-into the kitchen, around the wash tub, along the passage, into the front room-up the curtains, along the pelmet and down the other side for about an hour! It turned out they had hit an ammunition train in the marshalling yard, fortunately we had been protected by the way the shunting yard was designed but my father told me that houses closer had been badly damaged.
We then come to the flying bomb -the V1. I remember being bathed one Sunday morning by my father. He looked up, grabbed a towel, wrapped it round me and said, "Look". There was a flying bomb coming straight at the window-fortunately the engine was still running!. He rushed downstairs and we crouched against the front wall of the house. It carried on and crashed at a place called Ashford. near the barracks, but in open land. They were a curse-several V1's and V2's seem to have been targetted there. They blew up the Lincoln Motor works and tyre works.

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