大象传媒

Sometimes words of wisdom can be seen as gems of truth if they happen to fit the bill. I do know of such an incident in my own life. These words told me you should never revisit a place once you have left it.
On the Saturday aftrnoon when those German planes came over dropping thousands of incendiary bombs to set the London docks on fire, these little metal objects that seemed like toys were strewn about everywhere. Little boys were picking them up in the streets, people were throwing them from windows when they had penetrated roofs and fallen into houses, but these were nothing compared with what was to come.
That night, dogs were barking in the early evening - it seems that animals can sense danger much sooner than homo sapiens, and danger was on its way. We began to know the sound of German aircraft. It was much different from our own, probably because they carried tons of bombs and the aircraft we were used to seeing were fighter planes carrying only ammunition for firing at other aircraft.
Children were put to sleep in the Anderson Shelters, government issue for our protection to be erected in the garden of ones home. They came, these bombers, and one of the bombs in the first string of bombs to fall on London was to fall in our street. It fell on the corner of Shandy Street and Duckett Street. Mr and Mrs Betts who ran the bakery were killed when the shop received a direct hit and a girl in the house next door had her leg blown off. This terrible bombardment which went on for hours ceased as suddenly as it started. We lived more than a mile away from the docks which were on fire all along the riverside, the flames could be seen for miles.
Our Dad was a policeman and when he finally got home, he helped my Mum pack what they could and the family was sent to my Dad's brother who lived in the small town of Warwick. Dad had seen enough of death and injury and destruction of property in that one night to last him a lifetime.
My brother who was two years younger than I stayed behind with other relatives. I slept with Auntie in the shelter, my Dad had made her a slide to get in because she had a problem with walking. The house next door to them was bombed and splinters came through the side of the shelter. Auntie had one in her neck and I had one in my thigh which is still there today. It showed up on an x ray I had taken when I had a hip replacement seven years ago. My injury was treated with a field dressing - that's all the treatment I had - we just got on with it as other people were being killed. Apart from the occasional numbness it doesn't cause a problem.
It became harder to get to work each day, buses couldn't get along the roads, trains did somehow manage to get through but they took hours to do so and we were always late getting into work. No one reprimanded you, I think they thought they were lucky to get staff in at all. Even then you had to break off to go to the shelters when the air raid warning sounded and back to work again after the all-clear.
But, even through all this torment we still loved Duckett Street. We sometimes didn't see Dad for days and when he did come his uniform would be covered in dirt, his eyes were bloodshot through the smoke and one day after a particularly bad night he told us we must go to Warwick and stay with our Mum and the rest of the family. We didn't want to but we had no say in the matter.
The journey to Paddington was a nightmare. The roads were holed and fractured water pipes beneath them shot out jets of water which ran through the gutters like waterfalls. Gas pipes kept bursting into flames like geysers and on the pavements our feet crunched through broken glass and roof slates. Many houses of course were just piles of bricks and people were just aimlessly and hopelessly wandering about. That was our last look at Stepney, just sheer misery on the faces of all the people who stopped us to ask
"Where are you going ducks?" and when told would then say
"Gawd bless yer darlin' good luck"
One day I did go back and our area of houses, which was a bit like a village where people cared about one another had become part of the Ocean Estates and were just rows of blocks of apartments. It wasn't Stepney any more and with tears in my eyes I went away again.

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