大象传媒

I was fours old when the war started, we lived in London's Piccadilly where my father was a housekeeper.
At night we would go mainly to Fortnum & Masons which had a very deep basement, sometimes we would go to Green Park or Piccadilly Circus Underground stations. I remember standing on the flat roof looking at St. Pauls Cathedral outlined against all the flames from the docks burning.
During the Battle of Britain a bomb landed at the rear of the building and blew out all the windows and damaged the fire escape which ran the length of all the buildings in the block. I was sent to live with my Granny in Shripney, a small village outside of Bognor. One day whilst watching the planes shooting at each other, which we called "dog- fights" I saw a pilot bale out, he landed in the field opposite our house and walked across the road to our house. He was a German fighter pilot, my granny put the kettle on to make a pot of tea for him and I was sent to find the village bobby. When I and the bobby reached the house granny and the pilot were sitting with their tea and talking about the war. When the bobby had finished his tea he said that he would have to take the pilot to the police station in Bognor, the pilot said "you had better have this then" pulling out a revolver and handing it to the bobby.
One day I was in the garden when a large bomber which was on fire came in to land at Tangmere, it was very low and one of his wheels knocked our chimney pot off.
I went back to live with my parents in London, they had moved to a basement flat just off Tottenham Court Rd. My father was now a special constable and he would come home with stuff that he had taken from people who had taken it some of the shops in Oxford St. when they had been bombed during the night.
During the day he worked in Alperton testing Rolls Royce Merlin engines, sometimes he would take me to work with him and I would watch him as he put a full glass of water on top of the engine when it was running, none of the water would spill out even when the engine was revved up.
I attended several different schools at the time as when we all got there we would find that half the school was not there anymore and the teachers would march us to another school. It was not unusual to find some children missing from school some mornings and we would be told that they had either been killed or were in hospital. This did not really worry us as it was a fairly frequent event.
We were again bombed out and went to live in Richford St. in Shepherds Bush, there we had an Anderson shelter in the back garden, This was very cold, damp and cramped as there were five or six of us in it.
One night a bomb landed on the metropolitan railway line that ran past the end of the garden, fortunately it bounced the other side of the embankment before exploding, blowing off the roof of our house, so we moved again, this time to Bolton Gardens near Earls Court.
I was staying with my great aunt in Littlehampton when one morning every one was woken up by hundreds of plane, many of them towing gliders flew overhead. later we all went down to the seafront and saw hundreds of ships on their way to France for D-Day.
Towards the end of the war we moved back to Piccadilly as our flat had been repaired. One day whilst taking the dog for a walk I was walking past Buckingham Palace when a car with King George and Winston Churchill in it came out of the gate. King George opened the window and told me that the war was over, I ran all the way home and told my father, who then gave me a whack for telling lies, Later on when it was announced on the radio I did not get an apology. That night we stood on the balcony overlooking Piccadilly and watched the crowds celebrating VE day.

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