大象传媒

My parents lived in a semi-detached house in Crown Street, Egham, Surrey when I was born in November, 1938. Beside the adjoining house was an unmade lane which led to a service road to the backs of shops that fronted the High Street in the town. Whenever aircraft flew overhead, my mother chased my brother (six years older) and I into the house to avoid falling debris from them or shrapnel from gun bursts. My father suffered from arthritis in his arms so was not in the services but he worked in the Lagonda factory in Staines where service motor vehicles were built - on night work.
I recall one night, I believe in 1943, my mother picking me out of bed upstairs and she carried me downstairs and took shelter in a cupboard under our stairs. Next morning, it transpired that the glorious Luftwaffe had targeted an aircraft manufacturing factory (Vickers?) at Weybridge and one plane had jettisoned it's bomb load en route. The stick of bombs started to fall in Wraysbury, Bucks. and
fell crossing the River Thames at Runnymede where there is still a crater in the meadow beside Windsor Road. The next bomb fell on a
house in Park Road, destroyiong it and killing the occupants. The next
fell in the lane next to the house adjoining ours, buckling the walls
of that house and making it uninhabitable. The next fell on the wood
workshed of my father located at the bottom of our garden. I remember
looking in the crater to see that nothing remained of the shed or it's
contents except a distorted piece of clockwork railway track, all that
was left from seven hat-boxes full of this toy. Mud and soil was all
over our gardens back up to the houses, but no windows were broken.
The next bombs fell on shops in the High Street where occupants of the flats above were killed. The remainder of the stick went on to
explode over where today the Manorcroft School stands. Twelve people
were killed that night but my mother told me in later years that these
were not the only victims of bombing. A number of children at a school
in Pooley Green nearby were also victims.
We holidayed at my mothers home in Kent but even there were not safe. I can vaguely recollect an aunt pushing me into a shop doorway
when German fighters machine-gunned the shoppers in the streets.
My wife was not so lucky as me. She was born in May, 1941 when her father was serving in the Royal Artillery and he was posted overseas when she was only three months old. He was part of the Forgotten Army serving in Burma and India under Orde Wingate and Bill Slim (we have a photo of him on Slim's white horse and a copy of the Adjatants history of his unit set up specifically for this period and disbanded at the war'a end)My wife was nearly six years old when he next saw her

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