大象传媒

One night, early in 1941, the siren had gone but we were slow getting ready. I was downstairs with Aunt Sadie who was staying with us and my baby brother, aged one, was in his big pram in our living room. My mother had gone up to wake up my young brother, 7 years, who slept very deeply. The men of the house had been called up into the forces, my dad to the army in N. Africa and my uncle to the RAF in the Sudan so there were only women and children in the house. I was eleven years old. My brother, Bobby, was sleeping in the little box room and my mother lifted him from the bed and carried him to the door. As she did so there was a tremendous whizz bang and an incendiary bomb shot through the angle of the roof and landed upright on the bed where Bobby had been a second before. It stuck in the old fashioned wire mattress spring at an angle, fizzing and hissing and shining an intense white light which was clear even downstairs. My mother got a stirrup pump and a bucket of water and she directed the hose as my aunt pumped. I was told to fetch more buckets of water pretty sharpish which I had to carry from our downstairs tap up the stairs and I still remember the weight of the water and the unreal scene. An air raid warden later helped. I went to school next day, as we did, and told my friends how the bomb had somehow been bundled out of an adjacent window, wrapped in the mattress.

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