大象传媒

As I recall my memories I will write them down.

When war came in September 1939 I was nine and a half years old. People could not believe that war would occur, disbelief was registered on every face. The sirens convinced us it was so.
I lived in the East End with my parents and brother, with access to the Commercial and Whitechapel Roads. My parents had a restaurant in Philpot St E1. The road had a synagogue, and was allocated to be used as an air raid shelter; as soon as the sirens sounded the rush down the stairs of the synagogue was like an avalanche. Children and the elderly were flung like bungles to a side, everyone panicked, fright was written on every ones faces, no one really believed that war was inevitable.

I went to Dempsey Street School, which was fifteen minutes from where I lived. The teachers were adamant that the children should be evacuated out of the danger of London being bombed. Within a few days we were lined up at the railway station with our names printed on a card pinned to our coats. To safety country bound.
I made friends with a very nice girl on the way called Emmy. We arrived in Reading, Berkshire tired and hungry. We were introduced to many people who had quite substantial properties in the Maidenhead area, but were reluctant to take us in. It was getting late and we had to spend the night in a womens mental hospital which was frightening, next day we were taken to a village called upper Basildon, which was about fifteen to twenty miles from Reading, and accepted by a wonderful family called Timms. They had two teenage sons of their own. My life and Emmy鈥檚 were blessed for two and a half years; we called them mum and dad. I was reluctant to go back to London. Unfortunately, Mrs Timms had breast cancer, which Emmy and I did not understand, I loved her very much. She offered to adopt me, so many times, even though I was of the Jewish faith. I was very happy at the village school, the head-master invited me to play with his children after school time. I was called Shirley Temple because of my curly hair.
My father came to see me every weekend, when he wasn鈥檛 in hospital he was made very welcome by the Timms family, he came to wash my hair and curl it round rolled newspapers.

I was 12 years old when I returned to London, but to a new address, as Philpot street had been flattened by the bombing of the East End. We moved to 64 New Rd, which was a corner residence off Whitechapel E1 and across the road of the Royal London Hospital. My mother had made a restaurant out of the premises, with living accommodation upstairs and a big cellar below, accommodating seven cats.
As we did not have a bathroom in the house, my father and the family used a private one in the Commercial road, opposite a huge cinema called the Troxy. On the Saturday that daddy went to the baths, he chose a fateful time. The Germans had sent one of their V2 rockets, which exploded and devastated all around that area: cinema, baths, flats, houses were flattened, my father was cut to pieces from the glass roof that fell on top of him, his private parts were injured very badly, he dressed himself as much as possible and walked home which was about 2 miles, we asked him why he did not get on a bus, he said he was bleeding profusely and it wasn鈥檛 nice. As he stepped into the shop, we carried him over to the hospital where he was kept in and fitted with a pipe for his penis.

The sirens were going off and on, all day and night. The German bombers were happy to rain down their bombs on us as if there was no ending to their enjoyment in doing so.
The fire bombs must have been an extra pleasure; the East End of London was ablaze with flames, no one and nothing was spared. The putrid smell and flying ashes covered everything; the firemen were our constant heroes.
Meanwhile, my mother had all the windows in the shop fitted with thick blackout curtains; the business was open eighteen hours a day.
My mother smoked 80 cigarettes a day. I think it was for sheer bravado that she did not go to any shelter, including imbibing a medicine she took for her smokers cough, which might have included some sort of stimulant that made her happy. She loved playing cards and always had a cigarette dangling from her lips. I can remember how 6 policemen from Lemon Street Station Commercial Rd E1 came to play cards with my mother every evening, instead of doing their round. They did not come in the shop door, but knocked on the side entrance, with my mother saying to them, in her foreign accent, if you cheat you get no sandwiches.

Mummy was always busy with her customers, when the noise from the bombs became terrifying she would stand at the top of the cellar stairs, pulling at her teeth, and chanting in Yiddish at God, why did he let this happen? After the war she had all her stubs out.
One evening when we had an assortment of bombs thrown at us, we had a visitor, a well dressed young man. As usual we had a shop full of customers, and he asked to speak to mummy in private, she took him into the kitchen and closed the door. He was laden with jewellery. From each pocket he withdrew jewels that brightened the room with shining lights, he asked my mother if she wished to buy them for 拢5000-00 for all, mummy called me in the kitchen to ask me what she should do, I told her if she bought them she would go to prison, and that was the end of that conversation. He put everything back in his pockets and sat down to have a meal in the restaurant. When he opened the door to go he was confronted by police who had been waiting for him.

The shop was always full of people, eating, playing cards, smoking and enjoying each others company. Sirens and bombs went unheeded, the theme was if they died happy so be it. People who gathered together in air-raid shelters shared their food and hot tea that they had brought with them in thermos flasks. No one had an attitude, they made themselves cosy in any circumstance, there was laughter and shared happiness.
Another devastation by a V2 bomb was the St Georges Hospital in the Vallance Rd off Whitechapel E1. The whole of the flats and houses around collapsed, hundreds and hundreds of people perished. People were thrown around onto the streets limbless. The screaming and crying was without end. I don鈥檛 think anyone who went through all of this turmoil of picking up the pieces will ever forget. I know I won鈥檛.

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