大象传媒

In 1944 I was a 16 year old school boy at Bec School, Tooting Bec in South London, at the time of the `Doodle Bug` and V2 Blitz,and remember being in Balham, South London, with my mother shopping, when we saw the first V1 fly over and come down.
At the time we thought the Ack Ack guns had done a great job and shot it down, but that night on the news, Herbert Morrison,The Home Secretary,announced the arrival of the new terror weapons.

At the time I was a Sergeant in the School Cadet Corps and like most people, at that stage of the war,was a trained first aider.
Soon the bombs and casualities began to increase. The Head received an urgent request for volunteers to act as ambulance orderlies, and asked my school chum and I to volunteer, which of course we did.

Initially we were called out to attend `Incidents`, the name given to bomb sites but soon the main problem became the pressure on the hospitals and the need to clear the wards during the day to make room for the next casualities.
We then used to be called out of class to join the modified Greenline Buses,converted to take about 20 stretchers, which collected us from the school gates.

We were the only orderlies on the bus and would go to the nominated hospitals, often The South West London Hospital for Women, at Clapham South, one of the nearest ones and clear the wards of casualities,some of which had barely come round from operations.
We would then set off into the nearby countryside to Reception Centres, one of which I can remember was the Southern Railway Childrens Home near Woking, where we would hand over our charges and head back to london for the next load, often not getting home until the next day.
What struck us youngsters was the indomitable spirit of the people we moved, many offering us their surviving chickens etc., from their destroyed homes gardens and many other things as well, which we never accepted. They seldom complained on the long journeys but often showed signs of distress when, on arrival at some Reception Centres, the Air raid Sirens started sounding again.
We continued to act as orderlies right to the end of the Blitz, even narrowly missing one of the first V2`s that landed on Tooting Bec Common as I was cycling towards it!

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