大象传媒

I was a young girl just over 3 years of age when the war started. I lived at home with my parents by the Surrey and Middlesex border. There was a lot of bombing in our area, and this was because the Germans wanted to destroy the reservoir in our town. The reservoir acted as a source of water for the people living in London.

There was also restricted market activity in my town and residents would often exchange food such as margarine for sugar.

At home, our way of live was also changing. My father left his daytime job for national service in the Royal Air force, furthermore he moved away from our home to join their base in Melksham, Wiltshire. During the war I therefore rarely saw my dad. I however developed a closer bond with my mum and my sister as we lived with the daily threats of constant explosions.

Anytime I heard a doodlebug, I would usually run to the room and hug the wall. I never liked the humming sound.

After the D-day attacks, my dad came back home shortly. When my dad got back from fighting, he soaked his socks, which he had not had the time to change during the D-Day surprise attack. He had been wearing his socks for 48days. I imagined that the fighting must have been very intense.

As I grew older, I became fond of playing with bomb parts, which lay exploded on the streets, alongside other children in the neighbourhood. The air warden would take these scraps of bomb material from us. The bomb parts were not very large and the tail end was often left behind when the bombs detonated.

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