大象传媒

I was born in 1938 and one year old when war started. My family were living at Cattedown near the gas works.

One night the air raid warning started and my mother snatched me from my cot and ran down to the air raid shelter. The road behind us was completely flattened but our house was left standing. The end house of Tressilian Street was where we lived. When we arrived back into the house, in my cot was a shell. I would have been killed if I was still in it.

From there we moved to Kiel Place in Laira. We had the top two rooms, bathroom and small room, which was made into a kitchen. All the neighbours kept chickens and grew their own veg. The man next door kept geese which he let run up and down the back lane and at the end of the land there was grass. When I came home from school, I was terrified if I saw the gaggle coming towards me.

I was sent to Warrens School at North Hill. I got a bus every day! We had prayers every morning and one morning I heard my best friend had been killed the night before. Her house had been flattened by a bomb. For quite a few nights the air raid siren sounded and my mother would whisk my sister and I up in our siren suits and take us down to the nissen hut at the bottom of the garden, where we would see the search lights trained on to an enemy aeroplane with the guns firing.

There was an American forces camp near us. They would walk down the hill at the end of our street and my friends and I would chant "got any gum chum". We didn't have much luck. But one day we were given a big box of assorted chewing gum. We were really thrilled at this because sweets were on ration and you didn't know what a banana was, we'd never seen one! Well, we shared the spoils and went home pleased with ourselves. When my mother heard what had happened she gave me a real walloping.

We used to stay at Whitesands on our holidays in the chalets on the banks. The American soldiers would land on the beach and serve the children with icecream in tin trays.

My mother had four brothers and they went into the forces. Two to the airforce, one to the navy and one to the army. The Evening Herald took their picture in uniform because they all came home alive. Two of them, Frankie and Eddy are still alive, one is 90 years old in December and one is 84 years old.

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