大象传媒

As a fifteen year old, I lived with my parents and younger sister
in East London. In the summer of 1939 we lived with the constant threat of war breaking out; we had to go to the local school in the evening to collect our gas masks, we were instructed how to use them and told to keep them with us at all times.

On 3rd September 1939 we listened to Mr. Chamberlain broadcast his now famous speech announcing that we were at war with Germany. We were just realizing what he had said when the sirens sounded - we all rushed into the garden to find neighbors wondering what would happen next - would it be bombs, or even gas? Some time later the 'all-clear' sounded and we all calmed down again - I never did discover the reason for that warning - was it just to make us aware?

After that there was almost a year when nothing much happened on the home front, a blessing really, gave us some time to catch up with equipment etc.

Then one Saturday afternoon, halfway through September; all hell was let loose. There was a wave of German bombers attacking the docks and the railway marshalling yards. British fighters were fending them off, a blue sky was criss-crossed with white vapour trails and we watched from the ground, our planes and their planes, not thinking of the young pilots inside. Fortunately in spite of all the noise and mayhem, I did not see a plane come down, I might have realized just how deadly earnest this scene was.

Later in the war there was a systematic bombing of London designed to break the morale of the citizens. We coped with this (there was no choice!) though we were all extremely weary - not a whole night's sleep for weeks.

I turned up for school one morning to find just a huge pile of bricks- we all returned home and that was the end of my formal education. Our house was damaged three times, the first two occasions by bomb-blast; all the windows
were blown out and these were replaced. When it happened again the workmen
replaced all our windows with hardboard - after that we had no daylight and lived with the electric light on full-time. The third and final time the house took a severe shaking from a land-mine which fell a little further down the road - I should have mentioned that on each of these occasions, we were all in the Anderson shelter installed in the garden (which saved our lives).

This brings me to relate to you my most vivid memory of the war! When
we emerged from the shelter, dawn breaking, we were aware of a most overpowering smell of plaster - indeed it was a fine mist - as it cleared we looked at the crooked outline of our house; the bay window in the front had gone, and most of the back wall - you could look right through the house from the back
garden into the street, but although all the interior dividing walls were gone, wooden frame uprights still remained in place - and on one of these
hung the bird cage with my father's canary still sitting on his perch singing with all the wall which should have surrounded him, spread all over the floor!

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