大象传媒

The sand had trickled into my pyjamas and grated against my skin. Slowly the haze of sleep cleared and I began to wonder where I was. Why on earth had someone poured sand onto me? I knew I wasn鈥檛 at the seaside because we hadn鈥檛 been allowed to go there since the War had started and in any case it wasn鈥檛 it still nighttime?

As I grew into consciousness I could hear my mother and father鈥檚 murmured conversations, which had a distinctly anxious tone and I remembered, of course, that we were in the Anderson shelter. We would have been there all night because the air raid sirens had sounded early in the evening as the usual prelude to the nightly raids which thundered over London in that September of 1940. As always we had put on our nightclothes and gone to bed on the bunks that lined the cramped, smelly dugout that was all there was between us and the showers of high explosive and incendiary bombs that fell from the unknown enemy in the sky. In the morning we would ease ourselves out of the narrow little door and with older limbs aching a little go back up the tiny garden to the house to get ready for the new day. But this time it was different.

The long, sad wail of the all clear told us that it was safe to leave the shelter and through the rising mist of a crisp autumn morning I could now see why the earth covering the curved, corrugated iron of the Anderson had shaken through the cracks and disturbed my sleep. Number 36 Anstey Road, Peckham had changed considerably over night. A direct hit had reduced it to a heap of rubble which sloped steeply from the front wall, which still remained standing, so that bricks and slates reached almost to the shelter itself. Here and there pieces of shattered furniture stuck through the broken beams along side battered pots and pans and fragments of the every day items which go to make up a home. The true seriousness of the situation only struck me when I spotted one of my greatest treasures, a shiny model steam engine that involved the use of marvellously smelly methylated spirit, which was now crumpled and flattened beyond repair.

Up to this point, for a boy of six, the War, while not exactly enjoyable, had been quite interesting. For a start, school had been disrupted and sometimes even closed so that I and half-a-dozen others had special 鈥榯utorials鈥� in Rosemary Gadd鈥檚 house, a few doors along - and I rather liked Rosemary. Earlier on, in what people afterwards called the 鈥榩honey war鈥�, we went to stay at an aunt鈥檚 house in Hastings to get away from what everyone had assumed would be an aerial holocaust unleashed by the Nazis. This fairly brief visit had turned out to be good fun. Its highlights included trips with a cousin to the boating pond where we sailed small, steam-powered cruisers heated by candle stubs, the fascination of the lifeboat station with its working models of daring rescues at sea and, most exciting of all, a Hurricane fighter which crash landed on the shingle beach, its pilot emerging uninjured to everybody鈥檚 great relief.

On returning to Peckham just in time for the start of the Blitz (I never could understand how my parents managed to get the timing of this and subsequent moves so wrong) I discovered new entertainments such as the building of a shrapnel collection when my mates and I scoured the streets after a raid looking for the jagged bits of shiny metal that were the remains of the ack-ack shells bursting in the night sky. Already a currency for swapping had developed and larger pieces such as those reputed to have come from a land mine were worth many times the 鈥榦rdinary stuff鈥�. Innovations such as gas masks were quite amusing to begin with, particularly during gas mask drill at school when appropriately rude noises could be made by vibrating the rubber and sucking and blowing at the wrong times, much to the annoyance of Miss Tingley, the Headmistress. Having to cart them around all of the time soon became a bore however. Even the blackout was interesting, with great efforts being put into preventing light from shining through gaps in the material masking the doors and windows and avoiding the disgrace of hearing the ARP Warden bellow 鈥淧ut that light out!鈥� And later there were great games of 鈥榮earch and find鈥� using torch beams to pierce the inky darkness to spot the quarry hiding on the waste land created from the demolished houses.

But with last night鈥檚 bombing I now realised the true significance of the saying I had so often heard recently, 鈥淩emember, there鈥檚 a war on!鈥� My immediate concern was the fact that I was only wearing stripy pyjamas and red felt slippers and my clothes were somewhere under that heap of bricks. I was sure that my mates would all be vastly impressed by the fact my house was the first to be bombed in our street but I could hardly go to meet them wrapped in the blanket which my mother had thrown around me. I looked and felt like one of those refugees whose pictures I had seen in the papers!

My parents who had stayed remarkably calm during this time now began to get organized and it was decided that as the exit to the street via the front door was blocked, to say the least, the safest route would be over the back wall into the adjoining garden and out through our neighbour鈥檚 house. My embarrassment grew at this point as although I could easily have walked despite the encumbrance of the blanket I was now forced to sit in an old pram along with my little brother and we were pushed all the way to the tall, red-bricked school that served as a reception centre for those who had been 鈥榖ombed out鈥�. However, the journey was mercifully short and the cup of cocoa and biscuits I was given there helped to restore my self-confidence a little 鈥� but I still wanted some clothes.

R.A.C.
3/11/03

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