大象传媒

I have decided to set down my memories of the Second World War as a series of bullet points:
* I started school when I was 5 in 1940. I only could go for half a day each day as there was not enough room in the air-raid shelter for all the pupils.
* We were asked to give up toys etc for scrap-metal. I remember driving my pedal-car to school to give it up to the collection.
* I lived in Bristol and recall my parents taking my brother and myself up onto Bedminster Down to watch the City burning after a major incendiary bomb attack.
* The part of Bristol in which we lived was close to Avonmouth Docks, which were frequently bombed in 1940. A stray bomb hit a house almost opposite ours after that my father dispatched my mother, brother and me to stay with granny ( my mother's mother ) in Pembrokeshire. My mother's two sisters and their children were sent there as well. Granny lived in a small cottage in a place called Stepaside, near Wiseman's Bridge. We all attended the village school where the little ones like us were partly taught by the older children. We used slates and slate pencils. On our way to school we had to pass an unfenced mineshaft which frightened me. My granny cooked on an oil stove and had a radio which worked off an accumulator which contained acid.Lighting was by oil lamps and candles. On one occasion my father came down for the weekend and at one point demanded silence so he could listen to 'Winnie' on the wireless. I was intrigued as one of my Aunties was Winifred, known as Winnie. I expected to hear her voice! As it was it was Winston Churchill, of course.
* Before being sent down to Pembrokeshire, we spent many nights in the air-raid shelter. My brother and I had bunk beds. We took it in turns to sleep in the bottom bunk. Sleeping in the top bunk gave me nightmares.
* After a raid we used to go out looking for shrapnel.
* Friends, my brother and I used to pinch small amounts of food from our larders and hoard it against the possibility of an invasion.
* Later in the war when we were back in Bristol, the local golf-links were requisitioned and a camp for American soldiers was built. Some soldiers were billeted on families. Four families in our road where there was only one child in the family, hosted G.I.s. They were great fun and a source of all sorts of unknown goodies. We understood later that they all went over at D-day.
* I remember the telegram boy calling next door with the news that the husband there had been killed. It was at Monte Casino, we learned much later.
* My father, who was 37 at the outbreak of war, was a Gas Identification Officer. He was a scientist. He wasn't called up. However, at the end of the war, he was sent to Germany as part of a group of scientists and industrialists to inspect German chemical factories before they were dismantled.

I have many more memories of the war which ended just before I went off to Grammar School. However, these are so of the clearest.

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