大象传媒

I was 8 years old in 1939. We lived in Popes Lane, Ealing, in the upstaires flat of a converted farmhouse which was one of the staff houses for Ealing Electricity works next door, where my father was a shift engineer, a reserved occupation. he belonged to the Home Guard and my friends father was Chief Air Raid warden for the area.
SCHOOL
Our school, Grange Junior was closed at the beginning of the war and we had a similar mile walk to little Ealing school, a big Victorian building for a few months. later our school re-opened with concrete Air Raid Shelters, above ground, in the playground and in addition to our gas masks, we had to take a tin of non-peristable food in case an air raid lasted after school hours. We gave little concerts at the house of one of my friends and i think we also made small items for sale and sent the money to clementine churchill's Aid to Russia Fund. By September 1942 when i went to Ealing County School for girls, all the pupils who had been evacuated to High Wycombe had returned, so the school was no longer divided. In the absence of air raid shelters, protective walls had been built on the ground floor and lessons were transferred to cloakrooms and entrance hall if the siren sounded.
BOMBS
Right opposite to where we lived there were gun emplacements in Gunnersbury Park. At 8pm on a Monday in October 1940 a direct hit was scored on the switchgear area of the eletricity works. Fortunately neither of the two men on duty was injured. We had were only a few yards away in an Anderson Shelter in our garden and we definitely felt a tremer. A large beam from the ceiling lay across my parents bed and we had to move to a fortunately empty house at the other side of the electricity works. A year or two later a flying bomb's engine stopped above that house at about 1pm usually they came straight down but this one glided on to Ealing Broadway and caused much damage and loss of life.
LONDON
I remember the red glow in the sky on the night in September 1940 when many incondiary bombs were dropped on London, including St. Paul's Cathedral. In that vast building a tiny light was kept in the gallery so that the firewatches could orientate themselves at night.
In 1945 i saw the damage which a bomb had caused to the Temple Church.

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