大象传媒

I lived in Acton and I was aged 4 when the war started so my memories are rather sketchy. I remember small vivid memories like getting a Mickey Mouse gas mask and it being horrible smelling. I remember as a child my younger brother, Dennis was put in a perspex bag with a zip and a filter for breathing which was the 'gas mask' for all the babies. I remember my mother crying when she put her baby in the bag. I was evacuated not with the school but individually. I went to live with my Aunt in Watlington, Oxfordshire in about 1940. I hated being sent away because although my Aunt was family, she was a stranger to me. I remember my Aunt having a very old house - about 200 years old. It was so old it had an earth closet which was a hole in the ground which I remember being scared of as a child because I thought I'd fall down it one day. There was no running water only a pump in the kitchen, no electricity only candles and lamps and no gas. My Aunt cooked on a range cooker. I lived there at the beginning of the War for a couple of months through what was termed "The Phoney War" and then I moved back to Acton. I then went to March in Cambridgeshire for a few years from approximately 1941-42 and then eventually returned to Watlington in Oxfordshire to live with my Aunt where I attended a local school until the end of the war.

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