大象传媒

In 1944, around the time of my fourth birthday, I was living in Eastwood Drive, Rainham, Essex with my mother, Edith and my baby brother, John. I had a friend, next-door-but-one, called Barbara. She and I used to amuse ourselves sometimes by sitting on top of our respective coalbunkers, shouting, "Yes, no,yes,no,yes,no!" at each other repeatedly(and probably driving our mothers mad!)

One night in late May or early June the air-raid siren went and, as usual, my mother picked me up from my bed and put me, together with my baby brother, into our indoor Morrison shelter. She then went back to bed, apparently, and covered her head with the eiderdown!

The next thing I knew, my mother was tugging frantically at the mesh "door" that kept flying debris from the sides of the shelter. The shelter itself was like a metal table with mesh all around beneath the solid table-top. This mesh had buckled with the blast and I sensed my mother's fear as she struggled to free me and my six-month-old baby brother. By the time she got us out, there was a man from the Civil Defence waiting to help carry us from the house. I was amazed to see the ceiling hanging down in the dining-room where we had been and in the hall. I don't remember being scared, just very proud that the man carrying me was wearing a tin hat and therefore, in my mind, was a soldier, just like "my daddy". I remember telling him that my daddy was a soldier.

As we all made our way to the undamaged houses in the Ingrebourne Road, at the top of our road, Barbara's mother caught up with us. I remember that she asked my mother if she would lend some of my knickers to Barbara as the doodlebug, which had landed in her garden, had destroyed everything they possessed. I had been impressed by the sight of their bungalow, which was reduced to three adjoining fragments of wall. What impressed me most, though, was the thought of Barbara being left with no knickers: how dreadful!!

I soon realised that although my mother and brother had only a few small scratches from flying glass and I had not so much as a single scratch, my kitten, Bimbo, was missing. "Mummy" gently warned me that he would almost certainly be dead but she went back to look, anyway: a very dangerous thing to do, now I think about it, but typical of a woman whose idea of a bomb shelter for herself was an eiderdown! She found Bimbo - underneath an upturned enamel bowl, underneath the fallen sink. Truly that cat was a lucky one!

There was one tragedy as a result of our doodlebug, though:I was told years later that a man further down the road had put his head out of his shelter to see what was happening, just as the doodlebug exploded. He didn't survive.

I never saw Barbara again, as far as I can remember. My mother, brother, grandmother and I spent some time in Scotland and when we returned to Rainham we lived with two other different families before we got our own house. I wonder how many other people remember that doodlebug, which apparently had been intended for London but had been shot down by the ack-ack in a camp outside Rainham. If anyone could tell me the date it fell I'd be fascinated to know, as I've always thought it landed in May, which goes against all the usual accounts of doodlebugs not arriving until after D-Day. Most of the people I could have asked are dead now, so that remains a mystery.....

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.