大象传媒

My sister and I had been staying with our grandparents in Bexhill in August 1939 and had, with our Aunt, visited a friend of hers who had a notice in her window saying, "Don't worry! It may never happen."
I was nine years old a few days after the war began. We lived in Hartfield, a small village on the edge of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex.
We lived about two miles from the centre of the Village in the countryside and very soon a searchlight battery was established in a nearby field,('our'cowslip field, which never recovered) making us quite vulnerable to stray bombs, especially incendiary bombs. I remember walking over some fields with my father one Sunday morning to inspect the crater left by a land mine. Army lorries were parked along the country lane, but these came and went as and when they were needed elsewhere.
Schooldays in the village school were interrupted by air raid sirens when our class huddled together in the boys cloakroom, presumably because there was less glass about than in the classroom. We learnt how to use our gas masks and carried them about with us everywhere.
Later, in 1942, I moved to East Grinstead County Grammar School where special air raid shelters had been built, and these we used frequently during air raids. After school one day a bomb landed on the Whitehall Cinema in East Grinstead, killing many people, including some of our school pupils. We became used to seeing the 'Guinea Pigs' about in the town, badly burned airmen who had come to the hospital in East Grinstead where Sir Archibald McIndoe was doing his wonderful work with plastic surgery.
Food was rationed . Sweets almost disappeared, as did bananas and oranges. But I cannot remember ever being hungry. Living in the country we grew our own vegetables and kept chicken. My mother was a wonderful 'manager'.
At the beginning of the war evacuees came to the village from London. When the flying bombs and rockets started our school was evacuated to Taunton in Somerset. Not entirely, it was a voluntary thing and I decided it might be fun to go. It was not! We had lessons in the Bishop Fox's School in Taunton,and during the summer holidays had lunch in a British Restaurant. I was very homesick and after about three months came back.
We were very lucky living in the country because although we experienced air raids, saw the 'dog fights' between our planes and the Germans and had rationing, we were on the edge of it all and were fortunate to come through it all unscathed.And possibly the healthier for have less food!

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