大象传媒

One sunny Saturday afternoon, it must have been a Saturday because we were all out in the gardens and we looked up and hundreds of aeroplanes were coming across in formation. We were so pleased to see our 'airforce' and then the bombs rained down and we realised they were German planes. But what really puzzled us all, on Blackheath, which is part of Greenwich, we had anti-aircraft guns ands not a gun fired, I don't know why. The daylight bombing didn't seem so bad, it was the night-time bombing.
Let me explain, Blackheath is high and the land drops away and the roads ran across the side of the hill you might say. Where I lived there was no housing on the opposite side and the road dropped away to the Royal Naval Cemetery and then to the river Thames. These bombers came, in daylight but more at night, they aimed for the river all the time, they were after the power stations, Woolwich, Greenwich, Battersea power stations and of course the docks, everything. At once stage we had 69 nights in a run without a break and during that time they set the river alight, both sides of the river were on fire and burned for three weeks. They came back each night and threw bombs into the fire and the poor firemen were being killed night after night and they never got the credit they deserved at the end of the war.
From where we lived, from our front window we had a bird's eye view of all of this. People would come along our road just to watch, even though we were being bombed. Our windows were blown out right at the beginning, we were years without any windows - they were boarded up. Ceilings fell down, any bombs that fell used to shake soot down the chimneys, we thought we couldn't have any more soot up there but we did! We used to have incendiary bombs of course, we had one in the garden and one down our dividing wall. We had stirrup pumps to put them out with and the men in our group worked in a rota to deal with this.
We never wore gas masks. We all slept in dug-outs, night after night. Well, it did have its advantages, I managed to read the whole of Charles Dickens while I sat there. We had all three schools near us, Invicta Road, Halstow Road and Charlton Central. The schools were bombed, fortunately in the night time. Before the schools were bombed when we went to school, you'd go to school and if one of the children had been killed during the night you wouldn't bat an eyelid, it seems so strange. Just near me, I used to walk to school with Ethel Crocket and during the night an aerial torpedo had taken a whole row of houses out and she was dead amongst the others, but you just went to school. 'Oh, where's Ethel this morning?' 'Oh, she got killed last night!' It didn't seem to matter, you got used to it.
Oh the fires, they were terrific and my father who was usually an optimist, said he thought it was the fire of London which ws going to finish us, the second great fire of London. One night my mother and I were there and a policemen came, bringing home my father's gas mask and identity card. We had to carry our gas mask and identity card the whole time. These had been found on a bicycle that had been blown up. Some hours later my father arrived home cursing the man that stole his bike! So, that poor man!
My father was working for the General Steam and Navigation Company, he worked on the river Thames. He was Chief Engineer of the 'Robin', which was a supply tug. It only had one enegineer and Mr Marriott was Captain of the 'Robin' and these two men charged up and down the ruver Thames. Every so often the 'Robin' had to be degaussed (to neutralise the magnetisation of a ship with an encircling current-carrying conductor as a precaution against magnetic mines.)On these occasions me and my friend would be allowed to go on the 'Robin'. There was an old fashioned cooking stove and we used to cook mince or something, it was great fun, these trips down the river. He was also in the Home Guard, he was very proud of being in the Home Guard on the
river. Well, it was a great joke with him, but it really wasn't very funny. He said, 'If Hitler waits long enough the Greenwich Home Guard will all be drowned'. It was pitch black when there weren't any lights or fires and they kept falling in the river and getting drowned.
My father taught me to lay on the floor and fire his rifle. If the Germans came I was to lay on the floor and fire this rifle. My mother said, 'If the Germans come here, we'll be no quarrelling, I'll cook them a meal!' So it was all going to be a bit of a problem! My father said, 'You can't be a refugee in this country, just understand that, you have to stay here!' I think we all realised we couldn't get out of the country.
(Four years later) When I went to work in the mornings they'd be sleeping there in the Underground stations. It was dreadful that and on one occasion there had been bombing and it must have hit the water mains or something because the water came through the tunnel like a roaring train and drowned hundreds of them in one of those underground places. Terrible! Another time lots of people were killed when people pushing from the top to go down into the underground fell and the people underneath were suffocated.
There were lots of incendiaries, hundreds if not thousands. They just came down everywhere, they did give us a nice display. We had what we called Molotov cocktails come and they were large containers of some sort hanging from a parachute and then the incendiaries flew out of these so they were everywhere. You see it wasn't one place on fire, everywhere was on fire at the same time. We had stirrup pumps and the sand, we had one in our garden and the house next door was on fire and actually the men had to break in the front door to get to the fire and the first man fell into the old lady's wheelchair and shot straight through to the other side of house. The lady wasn't in there. It was a very strange house, actually during the fire it burnt a lot of clothes, these belonged to the daughter and she was 50 years old, the clothes were her school uniform when she was a little girl, hoarders obviously.
The flats opposite, one of those was on fire, it was a very bad night for fires. They were trying to break into the front door but they couldn't because the door opened outwards - the stairs finsihed right next to the door. Because there was a lot of us in our house we had two dug-outs, men in one and women in the other and my father was in the dug-out and they were shouting, 'There's a house on fire', and my mother was shouting, 'George, George, leave it alone, let it burn to the ground, George don't get out!' All this pandemonium was going on and my father had slept through the lot!. So the fire wasn't put out by him. With the incendiaries there were fires popping up all around you.
Another thing was that there was a dug-out higher up on the hill above us and it was hit and there were feathers everywhere and bits of body all over the roof, because of the fear of disease the firemen came and hosed the roofs down, tried to clear things up. They knew who was in the dug-out, somebody knew, we all had our personal dug-outs, each family. But there was also a rumour that there was lots of money in that dug-out so a lot of people came looking for money. There was also a lot of looting which you never hear about, I don't know what else I can say about that, but there was looting going on.

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