大象传媒

To continue from my previous story, my father got a laugh of his own at my Mothers expense later, as the bombing got more intense, during a particularly heavy raid all the houses on one side of the road had their front doors blown off, and on emerging from our shelters we discovered that some kind soul had gone to the trouble of collecting them all from the various locations they had landed in but unable to identify which numbered door belonged to which house, had, piled them in the centre of the road to be collected by their owners.

So mother set off to claim ours from where our neighbours were sorting through the pile in the road. It proved a little more difficult than expected; solid wood Edwardian doors are a considerable weight, and ours was not on the top, so mother had to bend down as she investigated further; Unknown to her our milkman was hurrying up our street on his round, anxious to get it finished before another raid caught him in the open. In those days milkmen delivered with an electric handcart which had a type of tiller system for guidance; as per the rudder on a boat, when the tiller was released the cart stopped. With his cart in front of him and no knowledge of the pile of doors in the road, the inevitable happened and Mum received a hefty bang in the rear, which sent her sprawling, she was so embarrassed that after reassuring him she was not hurt she rushed indoors and left dad to collect the door later.

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