大象传媒

It was 1940 and I was 5 years old. We were living in a new house on the outskirts of St Albans and I remember the garden most clearly around which I would ride my tricycle and where I would be the bus conductor and driver issuing tickets and punching them through the little machine which hung on my neck and had a bell on top.

In this garden there were a number of rose arbours through which I had to navigate and the vegetable garden towards the end where there were rows of peas which provided me with an elicit ready meal.
One day in this year this was all shattered when one night a German bomb hit the white concrete road in front of the house; it seemed that it was intended for the runway which was also white of the nearby Handley Page factory but instead it landed up just outside our house.

We were in the house at the time of this bombing but thankfully uninjured although we had an air raid shelter in the garden which we had used on a number of occasions prior to this event but not on this particular night. I remember that I was carried through the hall and on a table near the front door which was destroyed in the blast there was a glass bowl and in it was at least one goldfish happily swimming round; the bowl was not shattered and it still had water in it.

Outside we made our way down the front steps and I can still see the large black object pointing in the sky. I was very frightened and learned afterwards that it was a black pole, I do not know if it was for electricity or telephone, that had been uprooted by the bomb and was pointing at a very strange angle to the sky just like a large rocket or so it seemed to me at the time and appeared quite menacing. I think following this bombing we made our wayto the garden shelter. I do not think that we ever went back to live in that house again after this attack.

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