大象传媒

I was born in 1932, I was 8 years of age when the war started. I was born in Kensington. The day before war broke out I was on a train with all my school to Western Super-Mare in Somerset. We were taken to the Winter Gardens, where we were given a carrier bag full of tinned food, chocolate etc. Enough for a week or two鈥檚 supply. Coaches took us to a small village some miles away called Worle. Where we were taken to the top of the high-street and we were paired in twos and our teachers knocked at each door, and I was accepted with 2 other boys into a widow woman鈥檚 cottage. Where I stayed for almost four years. I came home on holiday a few times during the Blitz, at the time when the V1 bombs were dropping. While I was in the village we were also bombed, because some of the German airplanes, returning from Bristol, harassed by RAF fighters, dropped their loads to escape, and a number came down on the villages. One landed in our school playground while I was playing conkers. I was late coming into school and the blast took the doors out behind us, a teacher landed on top of us and was seriously injured. The bomb, on the way down, knocked off the church spire.
I was lucky, I had a second mother, but some of the children were very unhappy. Sometimes used as cheap servants around the homes, and sometimes talked about following the railways and walking home to London.
One of the guys I was evacuated with, picked up an anti-personnel mine, and it blew up under his desk, luckily, he survived, with splinters imbedded in his hands and stomach.
One of the girls, who I kept in contact with, went all the way down to Devon to get away from the bombing, and the house next door was hit. All the way to Devon to escape the bombs, and they still didn鈥檛 escape them. Her mother was furious.
At the time I was coming home from school there was a German pilot strafing the street. I jumped over a nearby wall, not knowing that there was a 10 foot drop on the other side.
From the point of view of my parents it must have been extremely difficult, as they came to see me only every half a year, which entailed catching a coach at 3:00 a.m., driving for hours down un-lit roads, spending a few hours with me, and then returning. My mother worked as a fire watcher at night and in a munitions factory during the day. While my father was head warden for the ARP, he used to go around all the main buildings in Kensington, where, in the event of the premises being bombed, he would be able to direct the rescuers to places where people may be trapped.

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