大象传媒

I was nearly 2 when World War Two broke out and 71/2 when V.E. day was celebrated.
My first war memory was my 3rd birthday in October 1940. We had spent the previous night in an Anderson shelter in our garden, and I remember walking up the path to my house in my dressing gown and slippers on a chilly, grey morning and feeling really exited because I was 3 years old.
Shortly after that I was evacuated with my mother to Shropshire. We stayed there for nearly a year; first, at a guest house where I got into trouble for picking the daffodils, and another where I had a ride on a carthorse called Lively, had my photo taken with a sheepdog, and was sick one night all over my toy lion cub, Leo.
We came back to London and stayed with my Grandma for a while. She had just acquired a dear little black and white kitten called Timoshenko after a famous Russian General. When I first saw him he was snuggled into an old tea cosy to keep him warm. Grandma didn鈥檛 have her own air raid shelter, so when the siren went everyone went to a large communal air raid shelter near- by.
Later we moved into a house not far away, where we had an indoor shelter in the front room, a Morrison shelter. On October 18th 1942, my 5th birthday, my brother was born. When he was old enough my mother would put us both to bed in the shelter, and would come down to join us when there was an air raid. I do remember that I would plan what to do if our house was bombed before my mother came into the shelter. I decided that I would get dressed, put my brother in his pram and wheel him down to Grandma鈥檚. I never realised that a direct hit, shelter or no shelter would probably kill us all.
In January 1943 I started school. I was longing to go, and the night before as I lay in bed and said my alphabet, my 2x and 3x tables. My school was a girls鈥� school that took pupils from the age of 5 to the age of 18. I had to go on the bus, so I went with one of the 鈥渂ig鈥� girls. She was 10. One morning in March 1944 we went to school as usual, but as we were walking up Tulse Hill we noticed a lot of water running down the hill. When we got to school we realised why. It had been hit by bombs during the night, and the top floor was badly damaged. School was closed to the Juniors for a few weeks, and when we started again we had lessons in a local church hall, where there were no desks or tables, and we had to kneel on a very hard, wooden floor and rest our exercise books on the chair seats. However, that didn鈥檛 last for long, because in June 1944 raids by V1鈥檚 or 鈥榙oodlebugs鈥� began and we were evacuated again.
We went back to Shropshire; we had 2 rooms in a large house, which could only be reached by walking across a field of cows, which terrified my aunt when she came to stay. From what I recall facilities were rather primitive. My mother had to cook on an open fire, and the chemical toilet was in a spidery shed and smelt absolutely disgusting. Later that year my father came home on leave and insisted we couldn鈥檛 live like that, so we went back to London.
My last memory of wartime was in September 1944. I was playing in the garden when I heard an enormous explosion and we saw a plume of smoke rising further down the hill. This was V2, a rocket, and it had landed on a local Methodist church killing just one person.
Finally, May 8th 1945, V.E day. A bonfire was built on some waste ground, and in the evening all of us children were skipping around it waving flags. Later that year in August, on V.J. day, my aunt took me up to Buckingham Palace. We stood right at the front up against the railings, everyone was chanting, 鈥淲e want the King,鈥� until the King and Queen came out on to the balcony to wave, and the crowd cheered and cheered.
My family was one on the lucky ones. None of us were killed or injured. Nobody was bombed out of their home, and while the adults must have been worried and fearful at times the only things that really terrified me were spiders and thunderstorms.

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