大象传媒

On the first of September 1939 I heard the postman drop his mail, our mail.
I picked up a buff envelope and took it to Mum, asking 鈥淲hat does OHMS mean, mum?鈥�
My dad, not long retired from the Royal Navy, was called back again. Off he went. This
time not to sea but to various shore establishments where he served until some time in 1947 when he virtually retired into a civilian life which he hardly enjoyed. He had served
33 years in the Navy.

His first tour of duty being finished he moved his family to Suffolk in 1937. There,
as soon as war was declared, our family and a friendly neighbour took to the task of
building ourselves an air-raid shelter, in the garden. This was not an Anderson or Morrison but a magnificent underground concrete job which became my home on many
nights in the next few years.

On 11th November 1941 the shelter came into its own. The story I now tell is part-fiction, part-fact. In the early hours a largish German bomb fell all of 50 yards from
us, sheltering in our underground bunker.

I can only now feel the surprise. Bury St Edmunds, my home town, was a quiet rural market town. Probably only known today for its beer and to historians for its motto:
鈥淪acrarium Regis, Cunabula Legis鈥� - the seat of the king, the cradle of the law. In fact
back in the 13th Century the Barons had met at Bury鈥檚 amazing monastery to draw up
Magna Carta.

So far the fact. An amazing explosion rocked us down below and I still have the memory of a mouthful of dust and dirt. Eventually we emerged to reveal the extent of the damage. Almost before we had taken this in we had sight-seers inspecting our house as if it was a wartime museum. My mother who was in charge of the family had just that day
made her annual batch of jam and chutney. Entering the kitchen she was confronted by
a heap of jam riven with glass shards. At that moment she burst into tears.

The fiction now cuts in. We were always told that the German pilot had been bombing
Coventry. He was returning home with one bomb on board. This may have been true
as he had little sense of direction. We were then told that he had seen the local sugarbeet
factory, thought it one of the many aerodromes surrounding Bury St Edmunds, and had used his spare bomb which hit the bottom of our garden. How on earth this was deduced I still can鈥檛 think. But I鈥檝e chosen to believe it during all these years. Our house was pretty badly devastated - windows broken, ceilings down. We were moved for three
months to another part of town while the house was repaired. Dad duly came home,
on compassionate leave鈥︹�︹��.

Tony Butterfield

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