大象传媒

At the outbreak of war I was a five year old boy living in Manor Park in the East End of London. Because the area was considered vulnerable to bombing we were some of the first children to be selected for evacuation . I remember being taken to Paddington station and then to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire . Being quite a personable little fair haired little boy I was chosen by one of the Evacuation Officers to be billeted with him and his wife . I was of course a very streetwise, tough little boy and much more difficult to handle than my hosts were expecting and within a few weeks I was admitted to the Cottage Hospital , supposedly with head lice . My Grandmother , who I had been living with ,was informed of this committal. She then went to Aylesbury and took me back to London again . I remained in Manor Park for nearly all the rest of the war . As nearly all the children were away the empty schools were used to accommodate people that had been bombed out and therefore homeless .As a result of this I had no school to go to .However I did get some schooling in the front room of a school teacher every Wednesday afternoon . There were two or three other boys about in my area and we spent most of the vast amount of time playing on bomb sites and collecting schrepnel ,sometimes still warm , in the streets . The house I lived in , with my Grannie and my Uncle Len was opposite a railway line and small marshalling yard and a prime target for German bombers . In the street where I lived I would say about one in six was flattened by percussion bombs and nearly all the remaining houses had one or more incendiary bombs . We had one incendiary bomb that came through the roof ,through the stairs and landed in the coal hole under the stairs . There was a fan light over the front door but because all the doors leading into the hall were curtained , there was no need to cover the fan light so the light from the burning stairs shon straight through . An ARP warden was passing by at the time and shouted at us 鈥減ut that light out鈥� where upon my Uncle Len threw the front door open and shouted back 鈥測ou come and put the bloody light out mate鈥�. To fight fire bombs most houses had buckets of sand outside but the night was so cold and the sand being wet , it had frozen .The garden was also frozen and the only way we could put the fire out go to all the houses nearby and collect the spent ashes from their fireplaces . The nearest percussion bomb to us fell on the railway embankment 25 yards away. I can remember being in our Anderson shelter and hearing the bombs exploding and getting closer and closer . One of the most frightening things was when one of the mobile AA guns would sometimes stop outside our house , without our knowing and start firing. Next to our house was a yard with a large shed type building in it which before the war had been used for storage . My Uncle Len was in a reserved occupation with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and his job was to take Concientious Objectors to work on the land each day .He used to park his lorry in the yard next door and one night an incendiary bomb fell beside his lorry and rolled under it . I remember watching my Uncle fishing franticly ,with a long handled shovel until he got hold of the bomb and took it over to the railway embankment . Towards the end of the Blitz there had been so many bombs and casualties in our area that we did not go down the shelter but stood out in the front garden and watched the searchlights trailing across the sky occasionally catching a German bomber in its glare. Our philosophy was that if there was a bomb with our name on it then so be it.

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