大象传媒

My mother was 8 months pregnant when they closed all the hospitals and school. They collected all the mothers to be together and put them on double decker buses - she had no ideas where she was being taken! At the time I was an only child. She tells the tale of the bus conductor having buckets on the bottom and top decks and having to frequently tip the contents out on route!

My mother ended up in a convent in Hastings. She had turned 40 so was an 'old' mother for those days. As a result she was thoroughly spoilt by the nuns. She had my sister at the beginning of October and returned home after 3 weeks. During this time I was shipped off to Watford to stay with my God Mother, I was 11 years old.

I just passed the scholarship to go to High School when the schools were closed in London so my parents sent me down to Reigate Surrey where the High School I should have been going to had been evacuated. I went with a friend and her sister - there were 3 other children and we were all billeted on 2 old maids and their maid. We were practically starved and had a really rough time. When mum and dad came down with the baby they charged my parents sixpence for the use of the clothes basket to lay the baby in.

When they opened up emergency schools in London mum and dad took me home again. Then the bombings started. I can remember them starting on the Saturday afternoon - we went down the Anderston Shelter in the garden. At the time when the sirens started Mum was making plum jam - it never did get finished as all the gas went!. I can't remember how long the raid lasted but in the evening the sky was blood red with the fires. There was another raid at night - we were all in the shelter again. At the bottom of the garden was a canal and during the night there was pop pop pop going on and my mother said 'They're machine gunning us now' but it wasn't. On the other side of the canal there was a ginger b eer factory which had been bombed and caught fire and all the bottles were going off!

We came out of the shelter in the morning and the garden was smotherd in burnt paper. There had been a Samuel Jones paper factory just round the corner and that had been bombed and caught fire. The paper of course was all over the gardens. We children of course couldn't resist going out the next day as you can imagine, to spot the incendiaries in the pavement which hadn't gone off -us kids were poking them with sticks!

We stuck it for another day and then my father decided, as the windows had been blown in the house, to take us back to Watford for safety to my god mother. On the way to the underground station I remember seeing shops with the fronts all blown out and goods all over the pavement, and a man up on a chimney - he'd been literally blown up there. We then found rooms in a house. Along by the canal was the ovaltine factory. Jerry came along with the stick of bombs, he was probably after the factory, but dropped one right by the house we were staying in- one side of the house came down and they say if it hadn't been for the fact that I stuck the pillows over my head I might not be here now! We went down to Norfolk, where my father had worked at one time, and that was the end of my childhood drama. I finished my schooling and growing up in Norfolk. We never did go back to London.

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