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Fragments of war by Pam Cluderay

I nearly didn’t get to grow up in Hayes Middlesex. My mother told me that while I was sleeping in my cot a bomb blew all the glass out of the windows and it took 20 minutes to pick the glass off me. I was fast asleep at the time. They thought I must be dead because I was so quiet.

Years later when I was five the whole family were in the bomb shelter in the garden and I wanted to go to the toilet. I decided I was much too old to use the potty in the shelter and rushed into the toilet indoors. A doodlebug was going overhead at the time. Unfortunately I got locked in and my mother got the young man from next door to come round with a ladder to try and get me out. He managed to open a slat in the window and undo the lock. I can still remember the sound of the doodlebug and my grandmother becoming hysterical.

On Victory night I was absolutely shocked because everything was lit up including the street lights. Someone lit a bonfire and I was terrified because I thought the sky would catch fire. I went to a Victory party and had orange squash and round knobs of ice cream in paper. It was the first time I had tasted ice cream.

My parents decided to go up to what I now know was the Chelsea embankment on Victory night. My grandmother said ‘you’re not taking Pam are you?’ I could only see people’s knees and my parents got jammed into an awful crowd and got lost. My mother kept saying ‘ask a bobby Fred, ask a bobby’. I was so tired I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.

My husband David who grew up in Southall fought his own private war by going out and firing his catapult at the German planes flying overhead.
He remembered the greengrocer raffling a bananna. The woman who won it proceeded to eat it in front of all the children whose mouths were watering. He was very upset.

He regularly slept downstairs together with his younger brother so that they could make a quick exit to the outdoor bomb shelter if necessary. His brother always insisted on sleeping on the inside next to the wall. Apparently the ghost of a Cavalier would regularly appear in the doorway, semi transparent and moving slightly. David always felt that it was there for their protection. He never said anything about it. Many years later I mentioned this apparition to his brother who said to David ‘oh you saw it too’. That was the reason he wanted to sleep on the inside.

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