大象传媒

Although I was only five years old at the time I have a vivid recollection of the day WW2 was declared. I can remember my parents listening to a solemn radio broadcast and my mother errupting into panic and demanding that Dad deiver Mum and their two little boys from the hail of bombs that would imminently be released over London where we then lived. She would not be calmed by Dad's reassurnces and eventually he went to a the Post Office to send a telegram to his family in South Wales.
The reply must have fine for just before midnight on that ominous day found Dad pushing Mum and two exhausted children of five and three,plus luggage on to a night train at Paddington Station'. Many other people must have shared Mum's urgent forbodings for the train was overcrowded to an extent which I found frightening. Dad was to stay in London which upset us all.
A fat sailor sucessfully demanded that seats in the packed compartment be surrendered to the lady and children and I can still remember the cramped corner into which I was pressed with Mum beside me and littlr Harry on her lap. I must have fallen into an exhausted sleep for the next thing I recall was furious shouting from my mother and the sailor at a tall man who had struggled on to the moving train and fallen heavily across us and especially me. I was yelling out of a misery which I suppose was more fear than hurt. But I was mollified when the offender presented me with a very large bar of Cadbury's chocolate.( Even now that unique mauve colour brings that scene sharply back to me to me.)
I remember no more until the early morning chill of Bridgend Station where we had to wait cold tired and hungry for what seemed, and must have been, hours for the local train.
Eventually we reached our destination and were met by my Dad's relation with the news that he had no room to house us but he had made arrangements for us to lodge with a neighbour.
But on arrival at the said neighbour's house we found it to be so sordid and smelly that Mum refused to stay. In no time at all we were back on the train and it was Dad's turn to be shocked by his family's reappearance at home within hours of fleeing from there.
Later we did move back to Wales,where our family belonged, but then in a more ordered and comfortable manner. But the horror of war made itself known to this five-year-old at the very beginning of that terrible conflict.

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