大象传媒

I was 4 years old when the big day came, September 3rd. 1939.
It took a while before the war started to affect us. It must have been sometime in 1940 that I first remember being woken by my old mum bless her, I remember it was so dark and very cold and she would never, never wake us till the buggers where right overhead.
This was West Ham, deep in the East End of London, with a railway yard, 2 chemical factories and a pumping station at the back of us and right in the middle was No.6 Pond Road.
Before the balloon went up some men came and dug a big hole in our tiny back yard and I saw what is now known as an Anderson shelter, it had 2 long benches inside and this was where we were going to spend many a long night.
My dad had died when I was a baby so my mum, sister and myself found things pretty hard. My mum worked shift Work in one of the chemical factories called Berks.
My sister had been evacuated to Newbury in Berkshire, so when mum was doing her shifts I would be farmed out to different neighbors.
We lived next door to a bakery which was owned by 2 brothers and these 2 men used to be in our shelter and had made themselves at home before we were able to get there, my mother did not like the situation one bit.
My mates and I would scour the streets in the morning after a raid looking for spent cases and pieces of shrapnel, sometimes this was still warm and the shell cases were great for swapping with your mates.
As the war went on us kids became used to dog fights in the sky, planes leaving vapor trails and weaving in and out with there guns blazing it was very exciting to us.
Many, many bombs fell in and around West Ham, one of my sister鈥檚 friends was killed during a bombing raid and many of our local shops were also flattened. A school, which was used as a fire station received a direct hit and many firemen were killed.
One of the most amazing night I remember was of being hauled out of bed, taken to the shelter, we were in there all night, the noise was incredible, all we had at the entrance to the shelter was a piece of wood about a yard square and so while all this was going on I peeped out and the picture I saw has stayed with me as though it was yesterday. The sky was alight with color, searchlights were lighting the sky, fighter planes weaving about with there machine guns blazing, the planes were very low and all the time you could hear the loud bangs from the bombs, that picture will stay with me forever.
Next morning not a window was left in our house, our street was completely wrecked, there was slates missing from the roofs and none of the house had windows. There were police everywhere, I remember the street being roped off, my mum was inside collecting things together, then I don鈥檛 remember how we got there but we ended up in Mill Hill. We stayed with a lovely family and I remember being given a box of lead soldiers and this was one of the best gifts I was given as a child. I can鈥檛 remember how long we stayed with these people but when we got home our house was clean, windows, doors and roofs were as new.
As the days went by and the bombing got worse we had to go to these big underground shelters where there were rows of bunk beds, these were in rows and you were sleeping next to people you had never seen before. There were crowds of us every night walking to the shelters with our blankets, some even took mattresses with them.
You got hardly any sleep and you didn鈥檛 know if your house would be there when you got back in the morning. Mums and Dads still had to go to work the next day How they did it I will never know. Could the young people of today do it? I don鈥檛 think so, do you?
One day the YANKS came to Pond Road, now the only Americans we knew were in the films so obviously to us kids back home in America they had all been either cowboys or some sort of gangsters like James Cagney.
Where the houses had once stood they started to put up prefabs, they gave us chocolate and gum and we looked at these tanned men in with our mouths open we found them unbelievable. They gave us their time and would stand and talk to us in a way that we were not used to and to us we felt they were all like the film stars we saw at the cinema, they were all so nice and nothing seemed to much trouble for them.
Not far away from where I lived was Carpenters Road, which had lot of factories which had been bombed out and the rubbish had been cleared and a prisoner of war camp had been built there, in it the prisoners were all Italians, they all wore dark battledress and on the back was either a large yellow diamond or circle. We would often see them walking about, we never spoke to them, but we would stare at them till they were out of site.
Sometimes we would see these prisoners with English girls, now this did not mean a lot to us children, but they would be told off by some of the mum鈥檚 and the older men as they were the enemy.
One time my girl friend came to our house crying and said her sister鈥檚 boyfriend had been killed in the war. I remember everyone just being so quiet. After that whenever we saw her sister, whose name was Vera, she was always alone.
Where my sister was evacuated was quite a nice place, we went to see her once. The house she lived in was opposite a huge park, once a German plane shot at her and her friends as they played in the park luckily he missed and nobody was hurt. Another time a German plane crashed in the park and my sister said they took the pilot away.
As the months wore on more and more parts of West Ham disappeared, whole rows of houses would be there one day and gone the next. In a part of West Ham there was a part you could walk from Stratford to Becton dumps, this long walk was called the 鈥淪ewers Bank鈥� it is quite hard to describe what it looked like because I have never seen anything like it since. If you can imagine a really high grass covered bank at leasts30ft. or more high and under this ran a huge sewer pipe about 6ft. in diameter, it carried sewage and went over bridges which were over roads and rivers and went on for miles and miles. One day there was a mighty explosion and a V2 rocket had hit the side of the bank, lots of houses went in the blast and the smell was unbelievable.
You often hear Londoners say, 鈥渢he Germans bombed our chip shop鈥� well in our case it was true. I was in a neighbors having some dinner, I will never forget, it was stew, when BANG, the ceiling came down in my dinner, dust and plaster everywhere. A crowd had started to gather at the top of Stevens Road where there was a very large pub called 鈥淭he Lord Gough鈥� this had disappeared along with the small cinema and sweet shop which were next door. Opposite was 鈥淓ileens鈥� the fish and chip shop, the front had been blown in and Eileen was badly injured and her face was permanently scarred which was very sad as she was only young and quite pretty,
The Doodlebugs came next and they were scary because you heard them and saw them but when the engine cut out they glided in silence so where they landed was in Gods hands.
The East end spirit saw many people through and we had many street parties, how the mums put food on these party tables must have been quite a feat as it was hard enough in the best of times, but they did it. Out would be brought a piano from someone鈥檚 house and a good time was had by all.
When the bombing eased up and things got easier my sister came home, it was very strange, I think my mum stopped doing shift work then and we didn鈥檛 use the shelter so much.
The Americans finished building the prefabs and moved away, those prefabs were in use for many years after the war.
I suppose if I am honest we kids quite enjoyed a lot of the war as it was like an adventure, and we didn鈥檛 see it the way adults did, to see planes fighting in the sky was so exciting and collecting bits of shrapnel and shell casings was like toys to us as we didn鈥檛 have a lot in those days..
I have tried to remember the parts that someone may find interesting of a small boys war.

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