大象传媒

I was born in St. Giles Hospital, Camberwell, in January 1932 and went to school at Leo Street infants school until the blitz started in 1940. At the outbreak of war, most of my class was evacuated, but I, my brother and several friends in my class stayed on. We were then in a mixed age group at Leo Street until the blitz started in September 1940.
At the bottom of our road was the main railway line through Bermondsey to London Bridge and Charing Cross.
I used to stand on our Anderson shelter in the back garden and watch the dogfights in the sky and one day, I saw a huge question mark sign in the sky. The following Saturday, the blitz started, the first two bombs falling immediately behind our house, knocking down a small end of terrace shop and half of the house adjoining it. The shopkeeper had been sweeping the pavement just as the bombs fell and was found two weeks later underneath the staircase of the partly demolished house.
When the all-clear went after that first raid, we came out of the air raid shelter and all we could see all the way around was a very red sky, where it looked as though the whole of London was alight. My uncle, who was in the Auxilliary Fire brigade at the time, told me some days later that Surrey Docks had been so badly hit that there were rivers of fire running down the roads from the wine and spirits warehouses.
During the next six months, my father, who was a plumber and therefore kept at home, was sent twice to the United Dairy Milk Bottling Depot at Vauxhall. He went one Saturday to restore the water supplies and was called out a six am the following morning to go back and restore them again. He found that somone had stolen most of his tools!!!
After the blitz ended, we went back to another school, where again we were of mixed ages and managed to continue our education piecemeal throughout various bombing raids. During this period on two occasions I had to dive for cover going home from school when marauding German fighter bombers machine-gunned my friends and I. Luckily, none of us were hurt although several children were killed in a school in Catford that was bombed on the second occasion we were machine gunned.

During the flying bomb period, I was in Woods Road School, in Peckham, to where we had been transferred, when it was hit by a flying bomb at the end furthest from where we were sheltering. A nasty experience listening to the thing coming down, before exploding. Some 24 people were killed in the row of houses adjoining trhe school. My mother, who had been visiting my grandmother half a mile away, saw the smoke from the explosion and beat the rescue services to the school!!! stopping only to tell the local air raid warden that I was in the school, when he tried to stop her going in.
Luckily the only one hurt in school was a teacher, whose head was cut from flying glass.
After this episode we went back to school at Colls Road, where in 1944 I lost half my class mates in a V2 rocket attack at New Cross. We heard that Woolworths at New Cross had some aluminium saucepans in the store and my mother, brother and I were just setting out from our house to New Cross, about one mile away, when mum turned back saying she had not put on our dinner, which was a stew. Just as we set off again, there was this big bang and we saw the column of smoke. as we got to the main road, we were told it was Woolworths that had received a direct hit. When I got to school the following Monday, I learnt that many of my class friends had been in the queue for the saucepans. Needless to say we were all very upset and little work was done for that week.

I subsequently managed to get a Junior Technical Scholarship and from Collinwood School, as it was then called, went to the LCC School of Building, Brixton, Junior Technical School for the next three years until taking up an apprenticeship in 1948.
In April 1945 we all had a day off to celebrate VE day and then later, VJDay.

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