大象传媒

My mother, Ethel Keith, was allowed to join the schools鈥� evacuation scheme from London because she had a 2 year old daughter, Pauline; a place was reserved for her with my school ,Upper North St , Poplar. However, when I passed the 11+ examination in the Summer of 1939 and elected to join the Coopers鈥� Company鈥檚 School , Bow, she could have switched to my new school. She chose not to, a bad decision. She had asked me first if she should stay with the primary school as she knew the other mothers there and I had told her that I did not mind what she did.

When war began I went to Somerset and she was billeted on a farm in Murcot, a very small village in a sparsely populated area of Oxfordshire. On 4th October 1940 a German bomber, returning from a raid on Bristol, still had a residual bomb. This was released arbitrarily over Oxfordshire and unfortunately fell on the farmhouse killing my mother and injuring my sister. Four others in the building survived without significant harm. If my mother had chosen to go with me to Somerset she would have survived the war. Even if she had stayed in the docklands area of London she would probably have survived because my father, Leonard Keith , remained there for all the war years without getting a scratch.

It might have been different for him if he had not made a good decision. Some months after my mother鈥檚 death he returned home from his munitions work in Dagenham to Morant Street, Poplar during an air-raid. As usual he went into a large brick surface shelter in the street to speak with neighbours who congregated there each night. After he left he heard the sound of a parachute flapping high above him. From experience, he knew there was probably a landmine attached and heading his way. Landmines were more powerful than most bombs at that time. He decided to run the few yards to his house and its Anderson shelter rather than return to the brick shelter. This was a good decision. Following a tremendous explosion nearby he emerged from the Anderson to find the house badly damaged but, far worse, everyone in the surface shelter was dead. The landmine had fallen close to the shelter destroying the walls and letting the thick concrete roof fall crushing to death all inside.

The trauma of the war did not end for everyone in 1946. Over 50 years after the Oxfordshire bomb I got a telephone call from my distraught sister who, between her sobs, kept apologising for killing my mother. Eventually I extracted the reason for her extraordinary claim. She had made enquiries about the details of the bomb she had survived when 3 years old. A cutting from an Oxfordshire newspaper revealed that she had been crying in bed and my mother had gone upstairs to see what was wrong. It was then the bomb landed. Rescuers made there way through a hole in the thatched roof to find my mother dead and lying across my sister in her cot. 鈥� If I had not cried your mother would still have been alive鈥� she said on the telephone. It took much effort to console her, greatly troubled over the event 50 years earlier. It helped when I told her that if I had asked my mother to evacuate with me she would not have died so I was equally at fault or neither of us were. I reminded her of Rudyard Kipling鈥檚 poem 鈥淚f鈥�; life is full of 鈥渋fs鈥� and there is nothing to be gained in dwelling on them.

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