大象传媒

My sister Mary and I were the youngest of seven children. The older five were much older than us. My mother was quite deaf and at the start of the war we attended the school next door to our house. Because my mother could not always hear the air raid warning our teachers allowed us to run to tell her when we had the alarm. We would climb over the wall adjoining our garden by clambering over the school toilet wall and dropping into our garden.We would then go with our mother into our Anderson shelter which was in our garden until the all clear sounded.We were never evacuated because Mum always said :If we are going we will go together: We only left London when our house was badly damaged when the house next door got hit. We then went with Mum to West Malling in Kent to people we knew when we went hop picking there. As soon as our house was habitable we returned.
My earliest memory was being held in my brothers arms to watch the red glow in the sky when the docks were bombed.
I also remember when the all clear went we children rushed out to find shrapnel which sometimes was still hot. We kept it in our treasure boxes and sometimes swapped it with friends. Our playground was the bombed out houses around our street where we found the bits and pieces that people had to leave behind such as photo,s and letters. Sometimes we found ornaments and books which we kept to decorate our :camp: which we made in the gardens of the houses.
We children found it quite an adventure.
When our house was damaged we were in the shelter with Mum and my older sister who was at work just managed to get into the door of the shelter as the bomb dropped and a sheet of glass just missed her face as she got into the shelter. The candle in the shelter went out and came on again instantly, this was caused by the blast from the explosion. Our school next door was eventually burned by several incendiary bombs and we had to go to another nearby.

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