大象传媒

HITLER BOMBED OUR SCHOOL.....

The trouble was, according to us small boys, that he didn't make a good enough job of it; the bomb only hit the junior boys' cloakroom. We didn't realise that the bombs that night were probably intended to land on the railway, Upminster being an important junction halfway between Southend-on-Sea and London. Quite a few bombs during the war landed on houses in the town but I don't recall any hitting the railway.

I was nearly six at the start of the war and eleven at the end of it. My three older brothers were evacuated with their high school to Street in Somerset but my young brother and I stayed at home with our mother, our father being away in the Navy. I was soon considered old enough to walk the one mile to school by myself or with friends. This undoubtedly seems young by present-day standards but there were almost no cars on the roads at that time; very few people had cars and of them petrol was only available to an even smaller number such as doctors whose work made them necessary.

The road past the shops to the school was a very wide one and they had built brick and concrete surface shelters along it. If the air-raid sirens sounded we would take cover in those until the "all clear" was sounded. The warning was unmistakably an up and down tone and we were always very glad to hear the single tone of the "all-clear". There had been cases locally of the German planes machine-gunning the shopping streets so one didn't hesitate to use the shelters even though they were dimly lit with uncomfortable wooden benches to sit on.

On our way to school each day we would collect fragments of shrapnel, small lumps of sometimes still-warm metal from the many anti-aircraft shells fired by our defences. They were much sought after collectibles, which we children compared. One thing posters warned us not to touch was the butterfly bomb. This was a rather nasty idea - a small anti-personnel bomb with open "wings" which exploded on being handled. I saw one once and reported it to the police.

Later in the war came the German V-weapons. The V 1, or flying bomb, was a pilot-less aircraft packed with explosives. It had a very noisy engine and we knew we were safe all the time we could hear the engine as it was still flying. As soon as the engine stopped because it had run out of fuel we knew that we had little more than a minute to find cover before it hit the ground and exploded. We grew very adept at finding houses with garden walls fronting the road to shelter behind from the blast. We even learnt that high walls weren't as good since they might fall on you whereas one could be safe lying behind a half-metre wall.

We lived about three miles from Hornchurch airfield where squadrons of fighters took off to attack the German bombers and how we cheered them. Some of these brave pilots learnt the dangerous proceeding of flying alongside the V 1's and using their wingtips to nudge the flying bombs onto a different course so that they fell harmlessly on the fields.

The V 2's were a different matter, they were rockets and the first one knew about them was the explosion. Nasty! Fortunately it was only a matter of weeks before our soldiers over-ran their launching sites.

A young child's perspective of the war was quite different from those who had to fight in it or even the mothers who had to manage without husbands, worrying about their safety, and cope with all the problems of rationing and life with all the air-raids. We children ran around with arms outstretched playing at being aircraft or fought miniature battles with long sticks which we pretended were rifles. Yes, we children were often frightened but our fears were soon forgotten. Life was for living!

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.