大象传媒

There was great excitement tinged with apprehension
when, at the outbreak of war my brother and I were evacuated to Folkestone.We boarded the Southern Railway train with our gas masks in a cardboard container,a tin of condensed milk and a bar of cadbury choclate that had gone within the first ten minutes.
We were near the harbour front in Folkstone billeted with an elderly lady in a large victorian house. There was no school.We roamed the waterfront, fell in the harbour and climbed the nearby hills of Sugarloaf and Wingate. I suspect we were something of a handful, for I can remember our landlady bringing the milkman to our up stairs bedroom one morning to get us out of bed.
When it was realsied that the war was not going our way, we were hastily return to Lewisham and then quickly relocated to Reading,Berkshire, where we lodged with the Sawyer family at 19 Grovelands Road.
The Sawyers were good people and in this stable enviroment we went to school in St Georges Church Hall and were able to relax and enjoy vaious sporting activities.
After 18 months or so, we returned to Lewisham and I resumed my education first at Lancelot Junior School and then at Downham Secondary School in Downderry Road.
In between air raids we would roam bomb sites collecting lumps of concrete and bricks in a hand cart to pile on top of our Anderson Air Raid shelter in the garden. Here we slept most nights in basic wooden bunk beds with hot drinks served from a thermos.When the interior of the shelter was flooded, we pumped the water out with an Air Raid Warden's Stirrup Pump, that was normally used to put out fires caused by incendiary bombs.
We also collected shrapnel from bombs and our own Anti Aircraft guns.There was a battery of 3.7 naval guns in nearby City of London playing fields, near Chinbrook Park, and when the guns fired our house in Galahad Road would shake violently. I can remember our excitement when, later on in the war we actually recovered a very large portion of a hot to the touch proximity fuse that had come from one of our own guns.
From the garden or shelter entrance, we would watch the V1 "Doodlebugs" pass overhead,running for shelter when the engine stopped and the plane began its plunge to ground.There were Spitfires and Hurricnes persuing them their machine guns audible as they sought to close the distance. Later I was to witness a more modern RAF Fighter (Typhoon?) actually tip a Doodlebug over by using its wing.I willed myself to be with the pilot such was my excitement.
A Doodlebug landed about a 100 yards from our house in Ivydown Road.It was fortuitous that I had just made our Anderson Shelter after having collected my younger brother who was playing in the street, for the house was badly damaged in the blast and a huge cloud of dust invaded the shelter.
We, my brother and I, were collected by an Air Raid Warden named Clarke and taken to his house in Lamrock Road where we lived until our house was repaired. Here, along with the Clarke's son John, we slept in the living room in a Morrison indoor shelter.
After returning to our house in Galahad Road, we resumed our almost daily watching of the day sky as the battle between the RAF and the Germans continued. We could clearly see Doodlebugs explding in the vicinity of Hither Green and then later hear the rolling explosion.
By now I was attending the Downham Central School in Downderry Road. Lessons were intermittent. If there were prolonged raids we did not go to school. Once day a house opposite the school was bombed, we in the classrooms were blown about as the windows caved in, dust flew everywhere and the blast was deafening. We trooped home thinking of ourselves as school warriors. The classes were mixed so the girls and the boys had the same experience.

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