大象传媒

I was about 13 when my home town of Bradford had its first and only air raid of WWII. In addition to the city centre, my district was targeted presumably because of an Army Searchlight Unit sited in the fields behind my house.

As the sirens sounded, I remember the searchlight being switched on. Suddenly the blacjout was gone, the whole area being bathed in a brilliance which literally turned night into day. I remember staring up at the thick column of light probing the sky, before taking cover in our cellar. The bombs which subsequently fell were wide of their target, but destroyed several houses in the vicinity. Some incendiary bombs however fell into the field nearest our house.

Next morning, I went out to have a look at the holes they'd made surrounded by patches of charred grass. In one hole, I found a fin and base plate, still warm. From a picture, my dad made a wooden replica of the burned out body part and fitted everything together. The result, which looks like a real incendiary bomb, has stood on a shelf in all the houses I have lived in over the past 60-odd years, and visitors often ask what it is.

Just after the war ended in 1945, I was called up into the RAF and stationed for a time at the Air Force of Occupation HQ near Hanover in Germany. I have vivid memories of how, during the bitter winter of 1946, German children would stand along the camp's perimeter fencewaiting for cookhouse scraps, which they fought over in the snow. At Christmas 1946, a young German girl working in the station's NAAFI and able to speak a little English invited two of us to her parents' home in a nearby village. We weren't supposed to fraternize, but we did. On the wall was the photograph of a Luftwaffe Oberleutnant shot down in the Battle of Britain. We took food with us and shared it, staying about two hours with the girl acting as interpretor. Her mother and father, kindly folks in middle life, made us welcome. We were just four people, strangers, former enemies, sharing a bit of Christmas. It was a moving experience.

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