大象传媒

In 1939 we moved to a village near East Grinstead. Our house was down an unmade lane that went to a farm, with laurel bushes on either side. In the early part of the war, soldiers were camping in some of the farmer's fields. One night one of the officers came to the house and told my parents not to be alarmed, but they had moved their lorries up the lane, and the soldiers were also n our woods. They left a couple of lorries in the fields. That night we had a bombing raid. I was about 9 at the time and my brother was 5. It was very frightening and we sat under the dining room table until the all clear. The soldiers were busy putting out fires from the incendiary bombs. Next day there were huge craters in the fields and the lorries left there had been destroyed. It was quite plain to everyone that there were fifth columnists about in the area.
Later on the in war at the time of the doodle-bugs, I was at a boarding school near Dorking in Surrey. One morning we were having a singing lesson in the garden, when we heard the sound of a doodle-bug coming, then the engine cut out and all of us dived to the ground and tried to get under our small chairs, except for the teacher conducting us and the pianist. When the doodle-bug dropped there was a loud explosion after which we all stood up and continued our lesson as if nothing had happened. It had dropped half a mile away in Holmwood village and some people were killed.
When I was home during school holidays, we wanted to go to the cinema to see Random Harvest, but that day it was raining and my Father wouldn't let us go. Thank goodness we didn't as German bombers on their way back from a raid on London bombed the cinema in East Grinstead and machine-gunned the people trying to run out and get away. My Father explained his reason for not letting us go, because the bombers can hide in the low cloud.
My young Uncle was killed in the Battle of Britain, aged 21 years and one of my cousins was a prisoner of war of the Japanese and worked on the Burma railway. He had a terrible time which he never got over, many years later committing suicide.

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