大象传媒

I ended the previous material submitted with an account of the beginning of the Battle of Britain. This was followed by the blitz.

I recall the beauty of the blackout. It didn't strike me at the time but when I was looking at some of Bill Brandt's evocative photographs I did recall the beauty of buildings by moonlight. Rather in the way that snow can beatiful even the most dull townscape, the London suburbs did assume a kind of beauty. The same feeling comes back if I, for instance, drive out of Ipswich towars my home deep in the Suffolk countryside. There is a lovely feeling as the lights end and the darkness begins.

One dramatic event was the dropping of a landmine nearby. The odd bomb had fallen and we would look at the resulting wreckage with a "we were lucky" feeling. But this was different. It was in 1941 and we had heard about the landmines, how they came down by parachute and exploded above the ground in order to creat maximum damage. One fell in the next road.

A friend of ours lived with his family near the point of impact and we went into his wrecked house to see if we could do anything. The devastation was immense. There were, as I recall, around 300 houses rendered uninhabitable. As we walked up the front path of our friends' house, there was a shout and we stopped in our tracks. There was a roar and a load of tiles came tumbling off the roof. We continued, thinking nothing of the narrow escape. We learnt that our friend had been injured and taken to hospital and his wife and one daughter had gone off somewhere. (The other daughter was in the WAAF and was due home on leave.)

We went into the living room and in the debris was some bloodstained paper. How serious were Frank's injuries? we wondered.

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