大象传媒

My first memory of the War was early in 1940. I was attending the recently built South East Essex Technical College at Barking in Essex. We had very good teachers and an excellent headmaster and headmistress. A group of us were evacuated to Dulverton in Somerset, escorted by a wonderful teacher, Mr Beaumont and his wife. We were taken to the Village Hall and suffered the ignominy of standing in line waiting to be picked! I was billeted with a nice couple who had the husband鈥檚 mother living with them. They had a terrier dog that obviously disliked children. He would follow me into a room and then refuse let me out. I have disliked little terriers ever since. After a few weeks my friend Joan Brandley and I began feeling homesick. Not that the people were unkind to us. So after 6 weeks we packed our bags. Much to our parents astonishment we managed to get all the way back to Dagenham by train. After all we were only 13 years old.
In June 1940 my mother and I were shopping locally when we saw a very bedraggled soldier getting off the bus. We were shocked when we realised it was my father who we thought was with the B.E.F. in France. He was luckily a 鈥淒unkirk survivor鈥�. After a short compassionate leave he returned to Woolwich Barracks. When he got there he reported that he was having trouble with his eye. He asked if it could be due to an explosion which occurred whilst waiting to be evacuated from the French coast. He was told there was nothing wrong and they insinuated that he was a coward and did not want to go back to the war zone. He was then posted to 126 Company at Catterick. A short time after arriving there he was in great pain and was rushed to hospital. They had to remove his eye as the damage had been left too long. After the War he tried to claim for this but was told that as he had no witnesses to the event his claim was invalid.
In October 1941 our house in Dagenham was damaged by the bombing. The thing was all the soot had come down the chimney and was all over the floor. As it was dark when we came in from the Anderson shelter - where we spent every night 鈥� we did not notice. As daylight came we were shocked to find black footprints up the stairs and in the hall.
My father at this time was in Catterick. After seeing the house was secure my mother and I with our pet budgie in his cage caught the train to Yorkshire. My mother tried to enrol me at the Richmond High School in Yorkshire. At this time the school was a private school. We were told that they didn鈥檛 take scholarship girls like me. Three months later, a few days before my fourteenth birthday, Essex Education insisted that they accepted me. A few weeks later a group of evacuees arrived. As we were all allowed to wear our own school uniforms, it certainly brightened up the school playgrounds.
My mother and I had to return to London when my father was posted away from Catterick. Under the E W O I was forced to take one of the situations offered to me. One was at a factory making rubber products. I didn鈥檛 care for the smell that emanated from the factory, so I took the second option, a position in the Accounts Department of a firm called Bulgins, only to find when I worked there that we had Epicure Pickles on one side, an ice cream manufacturer on the other side, and Sherwood Paints nearby. So the 鈥渟mell of the day鈥� depended on which way the wind blew.
Towards the end of the War there were the V1s and V2s to cope with. The V1s made a droning sound and then cut out. You knew when they were coming but not where they would land. The first night they appeared I was talking to some firewatchers. We thought at first that the Beaufort guns which ran around our streets were shooting down the bombers. Obviously we soon realised our mistake!
The V2s were more frightening as there was no warning; just a sudden huge explosion. One night I was walking home from the railway station when one exploded nearby. The blast picked me up and threw me to the ground. What amazed me were the brilliant colours which appeared in the flash of the explosion.
I feel all people of my age group had to grow up very quickly during the War. We also lost all our teenage years.

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