大象传媒

During the war, when I was 21, I used to travel a lot by bike because it was the only form of transport we could get. We were allowed to have a small blinking light, and although it did not provide any form of visual aid, it did enable others to see where we were. This was because of the blackout we had every night. Each day I would travel four miles to work and four miles back again. I was lucky I didn't have to walk, because I started work at 6:30 am and usually finished at 10:30pm. This would have meant that I would have to leave the house really early, and would get home really late. It also meant that if there were an air raid, I would not have been able to get to a decent shelter quick enough, and so would have had to find a ditch in a nearby field until it was safe to continue on my way. I was also in the land army, so again, my bike was an essential way of getting about.
I can remember one morning, we were on our way to work when we found that the beer factory had been hit and there was broken glass and beer all over the road. We could not bike over it because of the quantity .As you can imagine, the lads were not best pleased with the news of that. Things were always bad on a morning after an air raid, and although it was not as much of a panic, it was devastating. We never felt safe when we heard the siren sound, not even when we were in our Anderson shelters. If I could, I preferred to shelter with my family purely for the company aspect.
When we saw the planes for the first siren of the night, we knew that there was only a low risk of attack because they would always be heading for the bigger, more important places like Canterbury .We just happened to be below their path. But when we heard the siren and saw the planes coming back, we knew that the risk of bombs was now higher because if the pilots had any remaining, they would simply drop them purely because they could. Anderson shelters would protect us from shrapnel, but if a bomb hit it, or hit very close, it would destroy the shelter because they were very flimsy, even though they were buried. They were very cold and damp, so my parents fitted the families with benches, and stored a number of pillows and blankets. The bombs we feared the most were called' Doodlebugs' .These whistled as they went past, and once you heard the whistling stop, you knew they were then falling. This is when you held your breath, just hoping that it would miss you. I am sure many would remember this feeling.

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