大象传媒

I was 12 years old at the outbreak of the war. My brother was 2 years older than me. In 1943 when the Germans started their bombing campaign, Cromer was often the target of bombs which were dropped on the way home from their bombing raids.

On the night I remember most vividly, we were all asleep when the bombs fell, without warning. My brother was in the St John Ambulance brigade and he had to get out to help. I went to make sure he was up and found him rushing around the bedroom in the dark, trying to find his trousers! He went out as did my father who was an air raid warden. They did not return until the morning and my brother told me he had been helping to pull people out of the debris of houses and shops all along the main street in Cromer, Church Street. Most of the premises were shops and the owners lived over them, as we did. The people were all well known to us and several died, including school friends.

I asked him if he had seen Dad and he said "Yes, he was in a big bomb crater just outside the door, along with a policeman who had also fallen in, but they have just got out!" The policeman was awarded a medal for his work that night and I often wondered if he mentioned the time he had spent in a hole in the road.

It must have been at the weekend, because I do not remember going to school the next day. We both attended Grammar schools in North Walsham, a train-ride away, and a few weeks later we came home from school, and as we were walking down the road from the station we saw that several houses had been destroyed. We hurried home in fear that we would find something awful had happened.

We were relieved to find our home intact except that the windows of the shop over which we lived had been broken and were told that a Stuker dive bomber had come screaming along Church Street and had machine gunned all along the road and had dropped bombs on several houses including the local doctor's house. A man had been on the roof of one of the houses and they never found him. We had a confectioner's shop and the assistant had just got a cake out of the window and turned away, when the window was destroyed by machine gun bullets. What a lucky escape she had!

It strikes me particularly that in spite of all these disasters we were not unduly troubled and took it all as life. To us, although we were not uncaring, the whole thing seemed a great adventure

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