大象传媒

We are a group of women who sat one Thursday afternoon and talked about our memories of wartime. Some of us were children in World War 2, some of us were married and raising children alone while our husbands were away fighting.

Dilys remembers thinking, in her innocence, that the war was the most exciting thing that could happen to a six year old. The noise of the doodlebugs flying over sleepy old Tunbridge Wells made her laugh. Far away, in Ireland, Kit too was a child. Despite Ireland's neutrality she still felt the effects of war: food was rationed, there was no electricity, and she remembers seeing German prisoners being marched through the town on Sundays on the way to mass. Her Father called them 'squareheads' because of their square helmets; Kit was so disappointed to discover that their heads were not really square.

Vera was a little older, a young woman sent out on her first job. She worked in the Fire Service, operating the switchboard for twelver hours at a time, then cycling home with German planes flying overhead. As she cycled past the farms the German and Italian POWs working in the fields would wolf-whistle her. She was never scared: she made friends that she still keeps in touch with today. Rosie, too, was sent out to work, fresh from the country. She and her sister went to work at the RAF fighter station in North Weald. Her father warned her that she would hear grown men swearing, and he wasn't wrong. When she arrived at the aerodrome, it was a whole new world. She and her sister grew up quickly.

Phyllis was married in the war and remembers giving birth to her second child in Pembury Hospital. She could hear bombs in the distance throughout her labour.
Tunbridge Wells did not survive the war unscathed, with notorious bombs dropping on Woolworth's and up by St Peter's Church; but those of us who had been raised in London during the war became almost inured to sleeping in the shelters. Three times Mollie emergd from a night in the shelters to find she had no home; three times good old Grandma took them in. In the end the family began to laugh it off, trudging off with their salvaged belongings. Natalie, who was a young student nurse at Dulwich Hospital, could stand on the hospital stairs and see the Thames on fire when the docks were bombed. The sky was lurid with flames. The bombs sounded like a constant drone, and shook the whole hospital as they fell. (The more the ward shook, the more the patients asked for bedpans.) One day a bomb fell on the nurses home, and although the building was empty at the time, Natalie lost the feeling that her uniform made her safe.

There were many sad memories but some good ones too. Our abiding memory is of women who learned to accept what they could not change. The war, they said, was character building. And a long away from our Thursday afternoon, sitting and reminiscing after lunch...

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