大象传媒

We were at supper, say 9.30'ish, around the table in the kitchen. After the blackout curtains had been put up there was least light likely to escape from the kitchen window to attract the attention of bombers overhead - or the air raid warden! Tom was there. His mother was a widow, and he, an only child and a school friend of mine, was not infrequently with us for company. Meals on rationing were not banquets and biscuits and cheese, if there was any cheese, with a cup of cocoa might generate a feeling of cosiness for a half-hour before going to bed and before Tom went home on his bicycle, the headlight shielded with cardboard.

The air raid siren was a weary sound, less of a wail to set the pulses pounding, rather a mournful moan which left a question mark hanging in the air.
They could be coming our way?
They could be crossing the coast further along?
They could be flying over towards London?
They could be aiming for us?
Had there been a siren earlier this evening?

They might have been to London and be on their way home. In that case any plane which had failed to identify the target would probably jettison it's bombs when the moonlit Channel coast warned them of the end of the Sussex landscape.

We were only five minutes from the beach. The roads sloped downhill, crossing the E-W coastal and inland shipping routes. Why they had been flying E-W was hard to guess but we could hear sticks of bombs falling, perhaps about seven at a time, from the eastern end of the town, the crumps becoming louder.

We had previously agreed that in this nineteenth house the kitchen had been an addition, and that the wall up the step back into the house was probably the strongest support, and that we should stand against it if bombs were falling. They were near enough to hear the scream from the fins as they fell and to experience the fractional heart-flip of fear as the scream went over our heads to land in the next road.

Then silence!

It could be Clarkes? It sounded further over.
The Lumsdens are further down the hill. They should be alright.
It could be at the back of Caddy's - but it sounded closer than that.

Next morning the corner of the square was gone. The front of the four storey building was open to the sky. The old lady - or was it an old man? in bed on the third floor came down with the collapse and was still in bed, unharmed. But the square had been used for the construction of an ARP emergency water tank for firefighting. The wooden reinforced walls about two feet high at the upper end of the slope and six feet high at the lower, were some 60 feet square and held a lot of water in reserve. Now empty, the walls broken, there was a river of mud down the slope, but most memorably, on the road to one side, a delivery van. It had been loaded, to our endless regret, with eggs and the sticky yellow stream still escaped from the lower edge of the buckled back doors. The egg ration was one per person per week. Air raid damage was part of war time experience, but the loss of all that wonderful food was hard to bear.

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