大象传媒

I am now 72 years of age so I was just 6 when the war broke out. However my memories of that time are still very vivid. That Sunday morning will always remain with me because of the fact that all the family were poised around the radio with our gas masks at the ready. Then the announcement came that we were at war with Germany and I don鈥檛 think anyone uttered a sound for what seemed an eternity. We were ready as a family for what might come but all was very quiet. I will always remember that everyone鈥檚 gasmask was different. There was my younge brother in a complete baby one, and then my sister had a Mickey Mouse one so named because of the beak like flap at the front. Then there were the ordinary ones that I had along with my mum and dad. It wasn鈥檛 very long after the start of the war that there was talk of us all being sent away from London for our own safety. We were all got up ready to go, god knows where, up until then we had never been out of the London area, and that was only as far as Balham to visit my aunty Grace and uncle George and there children. One good thing though at least mum was coming with us so there would be myself, my sister Audrey and my brother Johnny. We eventually set off by train with lots of other people some children did not have there parents with them and there was a lot of crying going on. My next memory is of arriving at a place which I know now was Leeds, actually it was Armley where the prison is. We were taken to what seemed to be a community centre and in the large hall there were mattresses on the floor and these were separated by curtains. This was to be our home whilst we were found a more permanent place to live. On the next day after arriving we were told that we would have to find our own place to stay so my mother got us all together and off we went to look for somewhere. Well you can imagine what that was like for my mum and three children searching, knocking on doors in a completely foreign place. The first day we got back to the centre exhausted so my mum dropped us off and went out again that same evening. She came back quite pleased that she had found somewhere and so the next day off we marched to our new home. It was a nice looking house; I can see the front door with the lady standing there to this day. You could tell that she wasn鈥檛 very happy once she had set eyes on us three kids but she accepted us and in we went. We were shown our room which had one bed and that was for all of us to sleep in, we were told that we could only sleep and that after a bit of breakfast we would have to spend the rest of the day out of the house. Well my mother agreed and she handed over all our ration books. The next day we got up we had a little breakfast and then set off to see what was going on down at the centre. We could spend the day there with other people we had got to know. That evening we went back to the house only to find that the bed we slept on had gone; in its place was an old mattress on the floor. Apparently the women鈥檚 husband had come home unexpectedly on leave and he needed the bed. Well I remember my mum was crying and screaming at what she had been put through and now we were back to square one. It turned out that this women only took us in to get our ration books and now she wanted us out. We went back to the centre the next day and mum, left us there and I was to look after the other two while she went looking once again. When she eventually did come back she was all smiles, she had found somewhere for us. This turned out to be the best one could possibly hope for and the lady became our adopted granny, her name was Mrs Bellamy. We spent a very very good time there, I went to the local school and from then on we all had a happy home life like one big family. To this very day Mrs Belamy will always have a special place in my heart. We stayed in Armley for just over a year and my dad would come up and visit us now and again but he and my mum were becoming less enchanted with being separated especially as nothing was happening back in London. So it was, that they decided that we should go back home only to arrive just in time to experience the London blitz. When we all got back to Richmond from Armley things started to happen. We began to experience air raids nearly every night and up until then there hadn鈥檛 been a peep out of the Germans. The only thing that it had going for it was that there was certainly a feeling of adventure in the air.. Every morning brought something new and my collection of shrapnel was growing at an alarming rate. We now had some air raid shelters specially built for us just over our back wall on a piece of land called Ben鈥檚 hole, don鈥檛 ask why I never really new why it was called. In order to get to them quickly we had steps up and over the wall, you couldn鈥檛 have that today could you. Anyway one particular day sticks in my memory, it was a lovely clear day and we kids were playing out in the back yard when all of a sudden the sky above us seemed full of planes, there were hundreds of them. Everyone was looking up at the sky and waving, some shouting go on lads give it to them, and things like that, and then all of a sudden someone shouted, you bloody fools there jerries they are get to the shelters quick. Well no sooner had he said that when all hell broke loose, there were bombs dropping everywhere. I鈥檒l never forget that my dad was the last one to get in the shelter and he was at the entrance when a big bang blew him right inside and he was quite a big man was my dad. Of course what we had seen was the wave upon wave of bombers heading for central London but just how did that lot get through and in daylight too. Well after that things did get a bit serious for us then, we were getting raids nearly every day and night. Our little shelter over the back was condemned as useless and we were told our shelters would be the ones up the park in future. They were quite a way away and sometimes we didn鈥檛 have enough warning to get to them. It did get very scary at times even for me who up until now had treated the whole saga as a great adventure. One time I remember everyone was in the shelter and I went up to the entrance to see what was happening, I could hear this droning sound and I looked up and there was what I now know to be a doodlebug. This was the first one I had seen and I was transfixed at the sight of it. It flew right over my head and just at that point it鈥檚 engine cut out and it quickly came down over to my left which would be in the area of Brentford or Chiswick. I heard the explosion and saw a great cloud of smoke and the next thing I remember is getting a clip round the ears and yanking down the steps into the shelter. The raids carried on for another couple of days until one night all hell broke loose and Richmond itself was hit with hundreds of incendiary bombs which set Richmond alight. The shelters in Old Dear park were out of bounds we just could not get to them, I remember that night my dad who had a taxi at that time evacuated our entire row of house by taking everyone to the shelters on Kew green and in the morning his cab looked as if it had been in a bad accident but fortunately everyone survived that night. Richmond town itself had been badly damaged by all the bombs and we all regretted coming home so early. Looking back on those times I now can appreciate why my dad was loved by so many people, he was a bit of a hero to many during the war. However life for us kids was still very adventurous and exiting. I remember thinking how good it was that because of the bombing of the Bartons departmental store opposite the station us kids had a first class roller skating rink to play on. We also gained a large pond which was created by a land mine and in no time at all it was full of fish and newts. There was a certain amount of danger around though; you had to be very careful of what you picked up, especially first thing in the mornings. On our way to school we would collect shrapnel which upon looking back some of it was really beautiful. But there were the small bombs to be wary of the butterfly bombs that hung in the trees then there were the fountain pen bombs, pick one of those up and bang goes your hand. Yes you had to be careful but then the very fact that one was living at that time made you what they call street wise these days. We children grew up very fast at that time; in fact I find it hard to believe that when the war ended in 1945 I was only 12 years old. However after all the air raids and bombs that were dropping all around my dad decided to send us away again for our safety. This time he would take us himself to Wales where my mother鈥檚 sister, our Aunty Gladys lived. To a little village called Glen Neath which was a mining town and our Uncle Joe was a miner until he was called up to serve in the forces. I would go to school and I did learn a little Welsh but it鈥檚 all gone now. One time I remember well,was on a particular day we were on our way to school when a convoy of American soldiers passed us by and as they did so they through out tins of sweets and things. Everyone had tins sticking out of every pocket by the time we got to school. I remember the teacher confiscating it all until school was over for the day and then we reclaimed what was our and took it all home. I suppose we stayed in Wales about 6 months or so and then my dad came and got us saying that things had died down at home.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.