大象传媒

I was a small girl in Portsmouth,which because of its naval connections, "had it very bad" as they say!

My biggest memory, being very young, at this very big school, was that one afternoon the sirens went off and nothing much seemed to be happening for a long while. We were waiting for the "All Clear" sirens to go with going home time approaching and many of the parents were venturing out to come and collect their children. After a while my father came to collect me. We were on the way home when all of a sudden, we heard the planes!! So we dashed into one of the brick built shelters on the end of a road until the "all clear" went. There was devastation outside, rubble everywhere, and people covered in thick grey dust. We learnt that the school had had a direct hit, so I may not be alive today if my father had not come to get me that day.

I also remember my parents taking us across the water to Gosport, when the build up of activity there was for the D Day landings, to see the land/sea craft boats called 'Ducks', on the beaches, getting ready for Normandy.

If a shopping area, mostly around the Guildhall, had been bombed, people would go to see the devestation and we all marvelled. If it had been a huge store like the Landport Drapery Bazaar (similar to Debenhams or Jessops, the square or plot where it had been didn't seem that big! You wouldn't believe building had been on it.

My father, Sydney George Whitefield, had a coal business in Portsmouth, the family business. No lorries or vans, not even a horse - he delivered in the area around Fratton by "hand cart". I remember I went with him sometimes to collect the coal from the station yard. There was a house that went with the business, but we lived in another terraced house in Cumberland Road which had belonged to his father.(I never knew my grandparents as they had already died.)

So my father let the business house to an elderly couple, a postman and his wife - they didn't seem to have any children. In our back garden we had an Anderson Shelter, in which we would go down to sleep, I think most nights. It was damp and any heat on in it made the walls run with condensation. There were four bunk beds, and there were four of us - mum (Dorothy May, nee Marchant),dad, myself and my younger brother (Derek Arthur), who must have been a toddler. But we always had this couple who came from the coal business house, a street or two away. They ALWAYS had a bed EACH, every night, while we four must have shared the other two, as there was never much room in an Anderson shelter.
This house had a flush toilet at the bottom of the garden. One night this had a direct hit not many feet from the Anderson Shelter...and then one bombing raid the Coal Business was demolished.

It must have been this that prompted my parents to move up to Surrey - to Sandhills,Witley - away from the bombing raids.

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