大象传媒

I grew up in wartime Guildford down by the river. My father used to send out messages on the tanoy at the cinema on Sundays that whoever could collect the most silver paper to help the war effort won a competition. Collecting newspapers for the fish and chip shop in exchange for free chips, and the memories of the blackouts and the bombs that came so often.
My most amazing memory is one night when the Germans were trying to bomb the gas meter, that was behind the building yard where my father worked and just down the road from where we lived. On this night the bomb missed and hit the building yard causing a massive explosion and setting the building site on fire. The explosion was so big that all the windows in our house smashed and the doors came off and I was literally blown out of bed! When I got out of the house I ran down to the site where fire-fighters were struggling with the blaze. The heat was so intense and hot that the river boiled. I found that behind the building site there had been a secret army food store and as the fire-fighters emptied the contents outside, I grabbed tins of peaches and ran back and threw them over my neighbour's fence.

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