大象传媒

SOME WARTIME MEMORIES
By Richard Roberts

These are some of the things that I remember from my childhood during World War 2. I was seven years old when it finished.
Men came to build an air raid shelter in our garden and I have a mental picture of bread and butter plat SOME WARTIME MEMORIES
By Richard Roberts

These are some of the things that I remember from my childhood during World War 2. I was seven years old when it finished.
Men came to build an air raid shelter in our garden and I have a mental picture of bread and butter plates on the ground around the hole they were digging. I suppose my mother was giving them sandwiches or something but the strange sight of plates on the ground stuck in my mind.
I don鈥檛 think my father ever got a bill for the work, so, presumably, the government paid for it.
The shelter was mostly in the ground with about a metre above to the top of the thick concrete flat roof covered with soil. There were steps leading down from a wooden door and the stairway was covered with a timber construction. Outside the doorway, a low wall of Kentish ragstone offered some blast protection. There was a single air vent in one wall leading to a small wooden 鈥� chimney鈥�.
There was a period when we spent every night sleeping in the air raid shelter in our garden.
At that time we had a girl, who was older than me, living with us because her father was seriously ill in an isolation hospital and there were no other relatives to look after her.
So there we were in the shelter, my mother and father, Eileen and me, all in some kind of cot type beds. We must have had candles for light as there was no electricity supply to the shelter.
The concrete walls became stained and ran with condensation, and my mother would draw things in pencil that she and my father could see in the patina. By the end of the war the walls were covered with drawings of all kinds of things.
Some nights when an air raid was going on, my father would go to the top of the shelter steps to see what was happening. I desperately wanted to see as well, but of course, I was kept safely down below. Someone once said that war was a long period of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. I was too young to be frightened but was certainly very bored with the effects of war. These were things like the fact that my elder brother and sister were three thousand miles away in Canada, there was food rationing and shortages of everything you could think of, and , of course, no holidays.
The house we lived in was, what would be called today, a semi-detached chalet style construction.
One morning, after a night in the shelter, Eileen came down from the upstairs front bedroom and said to my mother that there was a hole in the wall. Upon further investigation it turned out that a cannon shell, probably from a Spitfire or Hurricane, had gone through the tiled roof into the loft space, through the lathe and plaster bedroom wall, ricocheted off the floorboards under the bed, split a chunk of wood off the corner of the wardrobe on the other side of the room and bounced back to the opposite corner of the room. Our lovely old black and white tomcat, called Dusty, had been asleep on the bed whilst all this was going on and was completely unharmed!
Of course, it started to rain and the water was coming through the broken roof tile. My mother went into the roof space, which was accessed via a door in the back bedroom, to place a bowl to catch the drips. Unfortunately, she put her foot through the ceiling when it slipped off a joist. A man came to assess the war damage and the hole in the ceiling got mended as well as the damage caused by the cannon shell. We kept that shell for years and the end of it was just slightly bent.
Another night my mother was just entering the back door when she heard a clunking noise behind her. The next morning she saw a jagged piece of shrapnel lying in the back yard. This had come from a shell fired by the anti-aircraft battery which was situated about half a mile from our house.
Mum always wore her steel helmet after that episode.
On a later night, she was walking up the garden from the shelter when she became aware of a shushing noise. It was the sort of noise made by falling shrapnel. When she stopped to listen intently the noise stopped. After a while she realised that the source of the sound was the collar of her coat rubbing on the brim of her steel helmet!
I must admit that I cannot really remember this next episode, but my father鈥檚 account of it is still fresh in my mind. Apparently, this was the only time I went to the cinema with my parents during the war. In Mote Park in Maidstone there were Aboriginal troops from Australia billeted in tents under the trees. After leaving the cinema, we walked to the High Street to catch a bus to our home which was about a mile away. Just then a squadron of German bombers flew over the town on their way to bomb London about thirty miles away. A platoon of the Aborigines who happened to be in the High Street were seen firing at the bombers with .303 rifles. As we got off the bus at the top of our road the bombers were coming back from their raid on London. The local people were more afraid of the Aborigines than the Germans and they were moved to the Romney Marsh after that
My parents were allowed to record a message at the 大象传媒 in London during the war which was eventually heard by my brother and sister who were in Canada. I remember being in a room with a bright red carpet and a step across the room to the raised floor where the microphone was.
It could have been on the same day as the recording, we were on a bus in London and the windows were masked with some sort of opaque material. In each window there was a small diamond shaped clear section so that you could see out to know where you were. There was much bomb damage everywhere.
It was probably near the end of the war, when it was a lot less dangerous to be in London, that I was taken to see, 鈥淢other Goose鈥� pantomime. It was splendid, with fairies in brilliant blue costumes flying out over the audience on wires and a huge golden egg.
At primary school we had air-raid shelters at either end of the playground. I can remember having to go in one a couple of times with my classmates and teacher. Towards the end of the war there were German prisoners with pneumatic drills demolishing these shelters and the noise caused more disruption to lessons than the war had done.
At the top of our road there was a large reservoir of water that had been built for the fire brigade to use in the event of local bombing. Prisoners were also employed to demolish that. I remember one man making birds out of bits of scrap wood and making the effect of feathers with a hot iron. He was probably a German woodcarver.
The main road to London, or A20, was at the end of our avenue and I can remember convoys of American trucks filled with soldiers passing along it towards London. We soon learned to call out, 鈥済ot any gum chum?鈥� and they would throw packets of chewing gum to us.
When the war finished we had a big street party and our house was some sort of command centre for it as we were about half way down the road. People produced jellies and blancmanges from packets they had kept for years. The man who owned the corner shop at the top of the road brought a huge tray of ice creams in the form of wafers. Not long after that I had my first banana at the age of seven.
es on the ground around the hole they were digging. I suppose my mother was giving them sandwiches or something but the strange sight of plates on the ground stuck in my mind.
I don鈥檛 think my father ever got a bill for the work, so, presumably, the government paid for it.
The shelter was mostly in the ground with about a metre above to the top of the thick concrete flat roof covered with soil. There were steps leading down from a wooden door and the stairway was covered with a timber construction. Outside the doorway, a low wall of Kentish ragstone offered some blast protection. There was a single air vent in one wall leading to a small wooden 鈥� chimney鈥�.
There was a period when we spent every night sleeping in the air raid shelter in our garden.
At that time we had a girl, who was older than me, living with us because her father was seriously ill in an isolation hospital and there were no other relatives to look after her.
So there we were in the shelter, my mother and father, Eileen and me, all in some kind of cot type beds. We must have had candles for light as there was no electricity supply to the shelter.
The concrete walls became stained and ran with condensation, and my mother would draw things in pencil that she and my father could see in the patina. By the end of the war the walls were covered with drawings of all kinds of things.
Some nights when an air raid was going on, my father would go to the top of the shelter steps to see what was happening. I desperately wanted to see as well, but of course, I was kept safely down below. Someone once said that war was a long period of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. I was too young to be frightened but was certainly very bored with the effects of war. These were things like the fact that my elder brother and sister were three thousand miles away in Canada, there was food rationing and shortages of everything you could think of, and , of course, no holidays.
The house we lived in was, what would be called today, a semi-detached chalet style construction.
One morning, after a night in the shelter, Eileen came down from the upstairs front bedroom and said to my mother that there was a hole in the wall. Upon further investigation it turned out that a cannon shell, probably from a Spitfire or Hurricane, had gone through the tiled roof into the loft space, through the lathe and plaster bedroom wall, ricocheted off the floorboards under the bed, split a chunk of wood off the corner of the wardrobe on the other side of the room and bounced back to the opposite corner of the room. Our lovely old black and white tomcat, called Dusty, had been asleep on the bed whilst all this was going on and was completely unharmed!
Of course, it started to rain and the water was coming through the broken roof tile. My mother went into the roof space, which was accessed via a door in the back bedroom, to place a bowl to catch the drips. Unfortunately, she put her foot through the ceiling when it slipped off a joist. A man came to assess the war damage and the hole in the ceiling got mended as well as the damage caused by the cannon shell. We kept that shell for years and the end of it was just slightly bent.
Another night my mother was just entering the back door when she heard a clunking noise behind her. The next morning she saw a jagged piece of shrapnel lying in the back yard. This had come from a shell fired by the anti-aircraft battery which was situated about half a mile from our house.
Mum always wore her steel helmet after that episode.
On a later night, she was walking up the garden from the shelter when she became aware of a shushing noise. It was the sort of noise made by falling shrapnel. When she stopped to listen intently the noise stopped. After a while she realised that the source of the sound was the collar of her coat rubbing on the brim of her steel helmet!
I must admit that I cannot really remember this next episode, but my father鈥檚 account of it is still fresh in my mind. Apparently, this was the only time I went to the cinema with my parents during the war. In Mote Park in Maidstone there were Aboriginal troops from Australia billeted in tents under the trees. After leaving the cinema, we walked to the High Street to catch a bus to our home which was about a mile away. Just then a squadron of German bombers flew over the town on their way to bomb London about thirty miles away. A platoon of the Aborigines who happened to be in the High Street were seen firing at the bombers with .303 rifles. As we got off the bus at the top of our road the bombers were coming back from their raid on London. The local people were more afraid of the Aborigines than the Germans and they were moved to the Romney Marsh after that incident.
At primary school we had air-raid shelters at either end of the playground. I can remember having to go in one a couple of times with my classmates and teacher. Towards the end of the war there were German prisoners with pneumatic drills demolishing these shelters and the noise caused more disruption to lessons than the war had done.
At the top of our road there was a large reservoir of water that had been built for the fire brigade to use in the event of local bombing. Prisoners were also employed to demolish that. I remember one man making birds out of bits of scrap wood and making the effect of feathers with a hot iron. He was probably a German woodcarver.
The main road to London, or A20, was at the end of our avenue and I can remember convoys of American trucks filled with soldiers passing along it towards London. We soon learned to call out, 鈥済ot any gum chum?鈥� and they would throw packets of chewing gum to us.
When the war finished we had a big street party and our house was some sort of command centre for it as we were about half way down the road. People produced jellies and blancmanges from packets they had kept for years. The man who owned the corner shop at the top of the road brought a huge tray of ice creams in the form of wafers. Not long after that I had my first banana at the age of seven.

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