大象传媒

I well recall a long hot walk from Ascot to Charlie's interment camp, set somewhere in the pine woods. Mother had baby Erica in her arms and it would be the first time he saw his daughter who was now over 6 months old (see: A3457280Sister is born in a cellar). Needless to say, the prisoners made a big fuss of us.

Dad would have been among the early releases, because it had to be 1941 and the story continues in Forest Gate. Dad had left school at 12 years, common for that generation, and had followed in Gustav's footsteps becoming a master butcher. As such he had strong arms and fists making him an ideal enforcer for the Moseley crowd. The rest of his family was not too proud of his political leanings. Years later he would say that as a child of an immigrant German family during WW1he suffered victimization in school and down Stork Road. When he became big enough and stong enough the tables were turned and he would become the terror of the neighbourhood.

Upon release, he picked up a job as a driver for an undertaker. This makes me wonder how Mum had kept us going for the year of Dad's interment because she never worked and nobody in our East End extended family had any money. One of his party stories was about a big Chinaman he and his mate had to pick up in Limehouse. They had trouble squeezing the corpse into the coffin and even more trouble getting the coffin down three flights of stairs. Eventually losing control of the weight, they hurtled though the front door where they went 鈥�**** over teakettle鈥� as Dad would say, the Chinaman rolling across the pavement and onto the street. On the serious side, he picked up many bodies from a school which took a direct hit with several hundred casualties.

As a treat, he once took me out of London in the Rolls Royce to pick up a corpse at a hospital. That trip bothered me and Dad too; apparently the corpse was decomposing and making a lot of noise in the back.

The air raid sirens had gone off and Angela together with her sister Dolly were crouched in the shelter with their respective babies Erica and Lewis. It was yet another house, this time in Osborne Road. Charlie and I were making cocoa and had just got back into the shelter when a bomb hit the church on the corner in Woodgrange Road. The shock wave set up a thick choking cloud of dust. We looked back at the house; you could see right through it to the road and a bare light bulb, switched on by the shock, swung too and fro.
Charlie decided that being bombed out twice was quite enough so he moved us to Haynes , a rather nondescript village near Bedford.

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