大象传媒

Does anyone remember when Gladstone Park was an Ack-Ack station with its own barrage balloon? I can remember how each walk to St. Helen's School in Willesden Green would reveal yet another newly bombed-out house. We got so used to rubble and demolished buildings that it meant very little to us children. However, one night in February my safe, if noisy, world turned on me. As usual I vaguely remembered my mother dressing me in my red siren suit and carrying me downstairs through quite a lot of noise from the anti-aircraft guns across the road in the park. My father was home on leave and, as usual, refused to come under the morrison shelter with my mother and me.
Before going up to bed I had done my nightly chore of shutting Paddy, our cat, out in the garden and locking the french windows - she always preferred to go out once it got dark - and something that sounded like a motor cycle 'drove' past a little way and then stopped suddenly. There was a huge bang and the house swayed from one side to the other and then settled down again but what was the most scary was the fact that Paddy was calmly walking through an open french window as though nothing had happened.
My mother went into the kitchen to see if she could boil a kettle and came back in and shouted at my father, telling him off for not closing the blackout curtains there. My father, a much more laid-back person than my mother, went into the kitchen, came back into the sitting room, put his arm round my mother's shoulders and calmly told her that the windows had broken in and torn the curtains. What upset my mother even more was the fact that she had managed to get a small chicken which she had cooked specially for my father's homecoming and put it to cool on top of the fridge which was in front of the kitchen window and, as a result, was inedible because of the vast amount of glass splinters.
I was not allowed to move out of the room because the floors were broken and there was broken glass and plaster all over the place. Apparently I cried a lot and said I wanted to go to my grandma who lived in Glasgow.
I had some lovely friends next door, Pat, Jackie, Georgie and Josie, Young who lived with their mother and grandparents - their father being a soldier - and when the 'flying bomb' fell they went to stay up in Yorkshire. I would love to get in touch with them again.
I'm so glad my own children have never had to go through anything like that.

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