大象传媒

At the height of the blitz it was nothing for me to get up in the morning to find people all up the passage asleep. They would come out of the town and knock on doors to ask if they could come in to get a bit of rest. But one night our luck ran out and a stray plane dropped a string of bombs across the meadow opposite, the first landing about fifty yards from the bungalow. Luckily there was a 20 foot bank in between us and the bomb which shielded us from the worst of the blast. We still lost most of the glass in the bungalow and the ceilings were so badly cracked that the ministry sent a team of builders in and stripped the ceilings and put up temporary insulation board and after the war was over another team was sent to put back proper ceilings.

Another very sad thing happened. A lad who was a close mate of my brother was outside with his father on a moonlit night watching the searchlights while all the rest of the family were in a big cupboard under the stairs, a thing that was very common in the early days before air raid shelters were issued. When father caught site of a parachute mine floating their way down, he shouted to his son to run for the cupboard. The father saw the parachute catch up in a big oak near the house and he ran for the cupboard not realising that his son had not done as he was told and instead took cover under the grand piano. A few seconds later the mine fell from the tree and exploded completely destroying the house, when the rescuers arrived on the scene it was a heap of rubble with just the tip of the stairs sticking out of the top. The rescuers dug as fast as possible and brought out six members of the family alive and they all survived, sadly the eldest son was found dead crushed under the piano. But it did not end there because it played on the mind of the father so much that a number of years later after the war, he committed suicide.

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