大象传媒

There they were again, the German bombers, right on cue with the now familiar droning of the engines. You could almost set your clock by them arriving night after night.
We were quite used to scampering into our Anderson shelter in the front garden when the bombs started to fall during the daylight raids, often before the air raid warning had sounded but the night raids were on a different scale.
The Anderson shelter was used during the early raids but my mother disliked the cramped conditions. By morning the walls were streaming with condensation and the atmosphere less that ideal through lack of ventilation as there were four of us in the shelter, my mother, myself, my brother and my sister, a babe in arms. My father was always out assisting with the fire fighting and rescue as he was one of the Air Raid Wardens. He was 39 and not yet called up but this was to follow. He was at that time working on munitions at the Woolwich Arsenal.
My mother decided that we would see out the remainder of the London blitz sheltering under the railway arch that was next to our house and where a number of the local residents would gather during the raids.
We sat there night after night playing Ludo or Snakes and Ladders whilst listening to the falling bombs and the anti aircraft fire The deafening sound and bright flashes were frightening. Some bombs made a whistling sound whilst others would rattle on the way down.
The duration of the raids varied, some were quite short, others seemed to go on all night. Sometimes you thought that the raid was over when a fresh formation of bombers would arrive and start their pounding.
When the all clear sounded in the morning I was out into the street surveying the damage and searching for shrapnel and incendiary bomb fins which remained after the bomb had burnt itself out. There was no school in those days because of the daylight air raids.
After one particularly bad night we emerged to find a huge bomb crater in the centre of the road in front of our house not more than five yards away from our Anderson shelter. Our house was devoid of windows and the house opposite had been reduced to rubble.
At about this time we discovered that my Uncle Fred, his wife and two young sons had been killed by a bomb. My mother never recovered after losing her younger brother and his family.

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