大象传媒

I was eight years old when the Second World War started. With my mother and father and two older brothers, I lived in West London near Heston Aerodrome where Neville Chamberlain had flown to in 1938 with news that war might be averted. I remember at that time what relief we all felt at home. How we were to be disappointed.

Mine are reminiscences of the times which we lived during the war years and are more a chronicle of events; most of them are still vivid in my memory.

There was the first air raid siren and our bewilderment about what to do, other than to continue to fix criss-cross sticky paper over the windows as we had started to do on that Sunday morning. I remember sitting in the cupboard under the stairs looking at my collection of cigarette cards illustrating air raid precautions.

Anderson shelters were soon delivered in our road and our neighbours helped one another to dig out a trench and put them together. They seemed to make us feel safer at the time but later, when they became damp and cold in winter, they were not so welcome, even when the heavy night air raids drove us into them later on in 1940 and 1941. I remember, too, the issue of gas masks and pillar boxes with special paint on top, I was told, to detect mustard gas.

My eldest brother was the first of the family to join up and enlisted at St. Johns Wood in London in the R.A.F. He trained in America and Canada before serving with Coastal Command around the world. My other brother was one of the first to join the Local defence Volunteers (later to become the Home Guard) in July 1940. My father, not to be outdone, joined the local Firewatch and learnt to use a stirrup pump, got to know the neighbours even better and learnt some new card games.

Like every family with someone on active service, my eldest brother was a constant concern to my family. There was so much sad news in the district and we remained on tenterhooks all the time lest an unwelcome telegram was delivered. Thankfully, he survived the war unscathed. I shall always remember our neighbour who lost two R.A.F. sons in the same week, one a Pathfinder, the other killed in a flying accident. As young as I was at the time, these happenings have remained with me to this day.

The bombing of London and the South East which took place between late 1940 and 1941 was, for those of us at home, a more frightening time. It was a time when we regularly retreated to the Anderson shelter to spend a noisy night as bombs and incendiaries fell in the vicinity. Our house had roof tiles removed when a bomb aimed at the Piccadilly railway line at Osterley fell on the London Transport ground a street or so away. About this time our Anderson shelter was replaced with a Morrison shelter which was designed to provide shelter inside the house with no need to troop down to the garden to take cover. They were large strong iron tables and were much more comfortable and safer places to be.

There was always some light relief from the bombing. Some of my friends and I would walk the kerbs in the morning after a raid looking for bomb fragments or fallen shrapnel from anti-aircraft fire. We would always be looking for barrage balloons to go up during the day as a warning of air raids to come and watch the endless vapour trails in the sky as the Battle of Britain was fought out in Southern England.

Despite all this upheaval school continued as usual, if interrupted by continual visits to the shelters. I was taught at the Alexandra Elementary School in Hounslow until the summer of 1942 and the war and the bombing seemed, in my memory, to bring excitement into the school day. From then I went to the local County School which was bombed in 1940, damaging the Science block, but apart from the periodic evacuation to the brick shelters in the school grounds I felt I had a carefree education. However, as school boys, from time to time we were made aware of the loss in the war of former pupils and the profound effect it had on the School鈥檚 headmaster and his staff.

Then there were the flying bombs and the V2 rockets. Flying bombs began to trouble us from June 1944 and I can remember chalking up on the underside of the Morrison shelter the number of explosions we heard. They were a bit nerve-wracking and I remember paying a visit to somewhere away from London to get a day鈥檚 respite from them. I recall my mother鈥檚 horror when a stray V1 flew over and exploded as we walked among the shops in the town we were visiting. We felt at the time they were pursuing us wherever we went.

After the flying bombs the silent V2 rocket was a contrast but made with the same explosive affect or even more so. When a V2 fell on the Firestone Tyre Company in the Great West Road I can remember one or two pupils being flung on the floor from the effect of the explosion.

In the background to all this, my mother coped with rationing and I can never remember the family going hungry at any time. Rabbit was a speciality and Yorkshire pudding with Jam a rare treat.

I have fleeting memories of the wireless announcement of D-Day and a passing interest in our forces progress across Europe but always a feeling of confidence that they would succeed.

My final memories as a fourteen year old are of being at cricket practice in the school grounds when someone ran across to tell the team that the war in Europe was over. The end was of course, in August 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bombs. I was on holiday with my mother and father in Swanage and remember a picture of the mushroom cloud being shown on the front page of the newspaper and the relief that Japan was ready to surrender.

Overall I played, studies and shared experiences with my friends who lived around and, because of our youth, we were largely untroubled by the war and the bombing and were really unaware of the consequences if the war was not won.

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