大象传媒

I was 12 years old at the time war was declared in 1939 by the Prime Minister, Mr Neville Chamberlain, on the radio. I remember within only a few minutes after the declaration the sirens sounded and the local street warden - a woman of about 40 running down the road wearing a tin hat and blowing a whistle. It all came to nothing. A false alarm.

My father had served in the artillery in the 1914-18 war and had been at the Somme and Ypres. During the early part of the 2nd World War, in winter, the blackout was really intense. Sometimes you could not see a hand in front of you. On one such day my father went off to work in the early hours to catch a train. He left our back gate, crossed the road and went slap into a lamppost. He was so badly hurt he came straight back home again. Sometimes transport, such as trains, would not be running due to 'enemy action'. My father would get a lift on the hack of a horse-drawn brewer's dray, so he gradually made his way home - walking a lot of the way.

We had an air raid shelter built in our back garden - made of concrete blocks and concrete slabs for the roof. My 5-year-old sister, Hilary, was just able to sleep at one end and she just fitted wall to wall as she grew.

Nothing happened for months. Then the German bombers began bombing London. Each plane would fly overhead - we lived in Bickley, near Bromley, Kent. We seemed to be right in the bomber path. Night after night they droned overhead and they had the place to themselves. Then one night anti-aircraft guns opened up with the biggest noise we had ever heard. You could hear the shells screeching upwards then exploding. We jumped for joy. This was indeed the best thing that could have happened. It raised our moral immediately - and this is why they were there to do just that - apart from shooting bombers down

Sometimes when we awoke to a new day after the night raids we would walk out into our garden to find it covered with small pieces of aluminium. The Germans were dropping mines and on occasions a plane would get hit and explode and get blown to pieces. We often saw aluminium foil all over our garden - dropped to stop radar location

At school young class masters would disappear - never to be seen again as they joined the armed services. We had bombs dropping nearby and mines not far away. When they exploded after their parachutes got caught in trees, the area of devastation was enormous.

One night, during a raid on London, we had got fed up with staying down in the shelter. We stood at our front door - my mother, father and I - to get a good look at the 'fireworks' over London. There was an almighty bang only 30 feet away up in a tree in our garden. We were all thrown into the hallway - ears ringing. I could not hear for a few hours as a result. An unexploded anti-aircraft shell had fallen from the skies only to explode in our tree. Shrapnel had been scattered all over our garden which my mother and father had been trying to make tidy the day before. It had gouged out holes in the house walls and had sprayed everywhere over lawns and flowerbeds - but none hit us!! One piece of shrapnel had passed between my mother's ankles as we could see the gouged hole in the plaster under the doorstep. The ringing in my ears came and went for many years after that.

I was not involved in my next story but all was revealed to me after I returned from a stay with my aunt. My mother, father and sister had gone to Farnborough in Kent for a picnic in the country. We always went on picnics. The war had somehow lapsed into a quite period. We had not had raids for some time. The storey goes that they had just settled down under a large tree when they were surprised to hear the air raid warning siren faintly from the village. Suddenly it was not long before they saw a group of Spitfire planes circling round to gain height. They had taken off from Biggin Hill not 2 miles away from their picnic site. Soon all hell was let loose as plans bombed, machine gunned and crashed from the skies. Cattle ran in circles in a field nearby. A warden peddled by on a bicycle and swore an oath on seeing my parents and sister huddling under a tree. My sister complained the tree kept moving as the bombs dropped. They collected several bits of plane, etc. This was Goring's raid on the British airfields. My family were lucky to survive. I was cross that I had not been there.

The night the V1 doodle bugs started (a Hitler 'secrete weapon') we had gone to bed. At about 3.00 am I awoke to hear a strange noise. Something we had never heard before. It was a deep-throated thunderous noise - like a motorbike without the silencer. It was increasing in volume but seemed to take ages to reach us. The noise became almost unbearably loud until at last I saw from my bedroom window the flying bomb with fire coming from its tail motor about 300 fee up in the sky travelling at 300 miles per hour. It was a bomb with short stubby wings and a tail fin with a jet motor mounted at its tail. This was a menace which would keep us from sleeping for weeks to come. They passed overhead and either side of us. We were down in the shelter then. We did not sleep very much for weeks as they kept flying over night and day. I could count 20 in the sky at one time. We got used to them, carrying on shopping and living our lives as normal as possible. Looking up into the sky each time one or a pair went thundering by, hoping their engine would not cut out which meant a silence before the explosion far away. I saw these doodlebugs flying past and a Spitfire trying to catch up with it to shoot it down - but it peeled away as it came over a built up area. Some were flying slowly with their engines on fire.

One day during the buzz bombs episode I was playing in the garden with my sister when I heard a high pitched swishing noise. I do not know why I knew what it was but I just had time to push my sister down the shelter when I saw a silver glint of a doodlebug gliding swiftly by behind some trees - it's engine had long been cut off and it was gliding to explode a few hundred yards down the road. As I crouched behind our house I saw tiles falling off a house nearby. I ran across the garden on my way to see what had happened when I was stopped in my path by stones falling all round me. The road could not be seen - it was covered with earth. The doodlebug had flown into a terrace of houses and had made a huge crater in the road. I learned that some people had been killed. A piece of the bomb - an iron strap had flown over our house only to land in a garden 3 or 4 properties up from us and had crushed the foot of an elderly neighbour in his garden.

I remember one doodlebug did not cut its engine and went hurtling ground wards with ever increasing noise.

One day my parents went to Bromley shopping during the flying bomb period and I was left alone in the house. It was not long before the sirens sounded and not long after I could hear the flying bombs getting nearer and nearer. I went out into the garden to see them. A pair of them - black and menacing - came streaking across the sky very low. Others followed one after the other while I huddled down our shelter - shivering with fright.

While cycling into Bromley on a fine day I heard an explosion in the sky very high up - a puff of orange smoke. What was that? Later the authorities had been investigating a plane which seemingly had crashed with a loud explosion in a built up area of London. This was the beginning of the rocket secret weapon - the V2 - which was being launched by the Germans. Later we were sitting in our living room one night when the carpet raised up from the floorboards (no fitted carpet in those days) and then a big bang shuddered the ground and house. A V2 rocket had fallen on a public house about a mile away - 40 people lost their lives that night. The rockets fell faster than the speed of sound. So after the explosion you heard the roar of the rocket coming down.

Once again we continued with our everyday lives with the devastating V2 rockets falling every now and then. On one occasion a part of our kitchen ceiling came down. We just shrugged it off and cleaned up the mess - there were people far worse off than us.

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