大象传媒

I was born in 1941, so I can't recall much about the war years.

But this memory is too real and too persistent not to have happened.

We had a Morrison shelter, one of those table shaped contraptions made of heavy metal with some sort of grill arrangement. It was in the 'other room' as my parents referred to it, (the sitting room), and there was a double mattress underneath and an enormous tablecloth which touched the floor, we must have slept under it several times, although I don't remember.

However the one instance that I do recall most clearly happened one Christmas, when I went to bed under the shelter, worried and tearful that Father Chistmas wouldn't know where my stocking was. Of course in the morning he had come, as always. That sense of wonder, joy and relief has stayed with me all these years as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

Dad used the shelter to build a chicken run at the end of the garden after war. It lasted all during my childhood and teenage years and was still there when I left home in 1961 to get married. It may still be there today!....

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