大象传媒

I was born in Gillingham in Canada House, which was then a Royal Navel nursing home. I was nine months old when the Second World War started. I think was broke out in September; I was born in the previous December. I was too young to be evacuated. My first memory of the war was being grabbed under my mother's arms and being run down the garden with her carrying me into the air-raid shelter, the Anderson shelter. Holes were dug in the garden and you had a shelter made of corrugated iron which was more or less level with the garden that you went down steps into. My dad had put bunks in there and we used to sleep on bunks, like single beds. There were three in there, one for my mother, one for my father and one for me.

We had electricity in the air-raid shelter so we had an electric light and we had an electric fire down there too. It was frightening during an air-raid, you'd hear this noise coming over and you don't know where it's going to land. When the houses were bombed, very often the stairs were left, so sometimes people would hide under them. I remember the V1 rockets, they would whine and then stopped, you didn't know where they were going to land - they were unmanned.

Air-raids caused a lot of damage in my area, some houses were bombed, some were flattened; our windows were blown out with the blast from the bombs which were so close to us. As I got a little bit older, there were some houses bombed out across the road and I remember being allowed to go and play in the bombed buildings.

My father I think was in the war at the start of WW2. He was on a destroyer ship, then he was given a shore base at Lowestoft, so my years from about one to about almost seven, which were war years, were spent at Lowestoft, in Suffolk. None of my family was killed or injured, not that I know of anyway. I always knew if he'd got a half day off because when he came home at lunchtime, if he took his tie off he wasn't going back. It was dad's home. One day when he was off for the afternoon the base got bombed.

There were very low rations, a lot of people had chickens and rabbits because you could kill them and eat them, because there was very little meat, cheese, butter and milk. These were all rationed. As far as I can remember we had chickens and rabbits for some of the time. Sweets were rationed and you could only get a few, there weren't many about anyway. You couldn't go into a shop and buy a packet of sweets, you just couldn't. There were lots of foods you couldn't get.

The signposts were all blacked out but it was all right if you knew where you were going. Can you picture any vehicle, with instead of having a big round headlight, the top half was blackened off so that only just the bottom half of the light could show? This was so that any enemy aircraft would not know that there was a town nearby because there were no streetlights. All houses had to have blackout material at the windows so you couldn't see if there were lights on so that anybody in enemy aircraft could not tell by looking at lights down below on the ground where they were. If any enemy did manage to land they didn't know where they were because there were no signposts.

Because I was on the coast in Suffolk, at Lowestoft you couldn't get on to the beaches or onto the sand as they had barbed wire around them. They had all great big rolls of bared wired because they were worried about invasions and the enemy landing on the sands or on the beaches and coming inland was a real threat. There was one part in Lowestoft, which was known as children's corner, which all the local people knew. It was just a small section which didn't have the barbed wire there so that all the local people, if they wanted to go down onto the sands, they could.

That was the place that my mother used to take me down to in the summer. We went regularly as we weren't far away.

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