大象传媒

I was born in Epping in May 1937 and my elder sister Sylvia and I were not evacuated. We had an Anderson Shelter, but it was a good sixty yards from the house further down the garden. My father reinforced the corridor in the centre of our bungalow and converted it into a shelter with bunks where the family would sleep every night. I can still remember my uncle Charlie teaching me the words of Jingle Bells one Christmas when he was on leave and staying with us. We were 17 miles north of London and could see the glow of incendiary attacks in the cloud and smoke above the city. We used to sit round the radio to listen to the latest reports of the war, read by legendary characters like Alvar Liddell.
We kept chickens and rabbits to supplement our diet and my mother made a fur coat from the skins. One sunny day I was lying on my stomach looking out of the French windows across the garden towards the hills in the distance when a V1 'doodle-bug' came chugging across the sky. When the engine stopped my mother grabbed my by the ankles and dragged me across the lounge into the shelter and slammed the door. The V1 came down in Beechet Wood, three miles away. When we opened the door we found the windows had been blown out.
We were only a few miles from North Weald aerodrome and all the local children could tell the difference in the sound of aircraft engines between the enemy and our planes. Formations of enemy bombers would fly over on the way to attack industry in the Midlands. We also used to collect the bits of shrapnell that were lying about after the raids. Epping had one V2 which fell on Brook Road just the other side of the railway embankment. It destroyed two houses and killed three people, but it was really a terror weapon. We were indeed fortunate that the embankment diverted most of the blast. I can still recall vivid images of George Lane STation (now Snaresbrook) ablaze after an air-raid as we travelled home on the train from London.
The gentlemen of the road, usually dressed in dog-eared suits, sporting a bowler hat, with their wordly possessions in a small parcel, had a den in a blackthorn thicket near the bottom of our garden. They still travelled about during the war. They did not trouble us and there was nothing sinister about them. However, to us children, any stranger was a German spy.
My father who worked in the Air Ministry, used to do Fire Watch duty on the Ministry roof, travel home on the steam train from Liverpool Street Station and then do ARP duty at the Bower House in Epping. I was in the Cottage Hospital for over six weeks because there were complications when I had my tonsils removed. My father would manage to visit me each night on his way home, which meant walking all the way up from the station in the blackout. During my stay in hospital a land mine exploded 200 yards away. It caused considerable damage to the wards but the staff soldiered on. Another land mine hit the Gas Works and we were picking coke out of flower beds for years after the war.
My father was responsible for commissioning 750 airfields in readiness for war. On one occasion he was flown above the fields of Cambridgeshire in a Tiger Moth by a young farmer eager to convince him that his farm was a suitable site for an airfield. The young man's name was Marshall. Just before my father died in 1989 he stayed in Cambridge for a few days to watch a minor-counties cricket match. He was invited to visit Lord Marshall to talk over old times because Lord Marshall was writing his memoirs and the decision my father had made was crucial to the future development of
Cambridge Airport and Marshall Engineering.
I was very privileged to live next door to a bomber pilot and his family. His name was John Garwell, nick-named Ginger or Arthur. He flew Lancasters and was shot down on 17th April 1942 on the Augsburg raid. Squadron Leader Nettleton who led the raid was awarded the VC and Arthur got the DFC. Having dropped his bomb load on the target he crash-landed in a field saving all but one of his crew. He spent the rest of the war in POW camps ending up in Colditz I believe. When he returned from the war it was extremely sad that his marriage broke up. His wife was broken by the years apart and they were not the same people any more.
That was how war left its mark.
In a way it was the influence of role models like Arthur Garwell that led me to go to the RAF College Cranwell and join the Royal Air Force.

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