大象传媒

When my Grandmother and my two uncles and aunts were bombed out in Central London and came to stay with us, things got very crowded for awhile until they could find a house. My uncles slept in the two bedrooms, my father slept on a spare mattress on the floor of the kitchen, my grandmother, and aunts (who were very frightened after their experiences in London,) with my mother and baby brother sat up in deck chairs in the Anderson shelter, I slept in the neighbours shelter. At 0430, mother went indoors to get my fathers breakfast for he was a postman and had to be at work by 0600, (an hours bike ride away) then she got my uncles breakfast, then mine, then fed and bathed my brother. My grandmother and aunts got their own breakfasts then went up to beds vacated by my uncles for they could get very little sleep in the crowded shelter. Mother did the housework, washing, ironing, and shopping. My Aunts exercised the dog, and looked for a house. Mother made the evening meal for them all, then the siren went, and it all started over again. After about a week of this with my mother getting virtually no sleep at all, she cold stand it no longer and at about midnight, she came out of the shelter and crawled into the makeshift bed on the floor beside dad in the kitchen. She had 4.5 hours of sleep that night and she said it was wonderful. After that she slept on the floor with dad until the family from Stepney found a house and we were all reunited in our own shelter.

One of the stories my aunts told me about their last night in Stepney was about their mongrel dog, Smudge, who when the family retired for the night with other members of the street into the concrete shelters built into the middle of the road, would wander off to sit outside the house in the next street where his current lady love lived. This particularly dreadful night the bombing was so heavy that when grandmother and family emerged from the shelter in the morning, the house was so badly damaged that they cold no longer live in it, so they decided to stay with us in the comparative safety of the Surrey suburbs; but when they were ready to set off, they could not find the dog. They hunted for an hour, and then someone remembered the bitch on heat in the next street and went round to see if the dog was there. Sure enough, there he was sitting on a pile of broken glass outside the house, where the other dog had been, but who had gone to relatives in Essex with its owners the day before!

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