大象传媒

CALM BEFORE THE STORM

As a child aged 8 when war broke out I was not really aware of its likely hardships and deprivations. My brother and I initially filled with excitement over something unusual that was about to happen. How quickly we became disillusioned!

We lived with Mum and Dad in North London and on Sept. 3rd 1939 we were all on holiday with relatives in Norfolk. It was a natural follow on from that that we stayed on initially as evacuees. Mum and Dad went back home and the war seemed far, far away from us as absolutely nothing happened for nearly a year. We came back to London and went back to our old school. The school was then evacuated to Frinton-on-Sea and we went with it. Still nothing happened to us although we witnessed several incidents of merchant ships being torpedoed in the Channel with resultant survivors being brought in by Clacton lifeboats. We returned home again.

Usually we slept in our Anderson shelter as the Luftwaffe had now started bombing London in night raids. On 1st November 1941 however, we had a visit from Uncle Tom, a good friend and neighbour of ours who lived four doors away up the road. He was an Air Raid Warden and, with my Dad, was responsible for patrolling our immediate neighbourhood. On this occasion he had come to see us late in the evening as he was off to Cornwall early the next morning to see his wife and boy who were evacuated there. His little Morris 8 CMC 317 was already loaded and stood in the garage ready to leave. He left us to go home around midnight. There had been no air raid warnings and everything was very quiet and pitch dark. Mum decided that as it was so late and no warning was on, we would stay in the house and sleep on the sitting room floor rather than go down in the cold, damp and unwelcoming shelter.

At 6.30 a.m. I was awoken by a terrific crash followed by a silence and then the thunder of thousands of tiles crashing down the gardens all around us. I felt that I had fallen through the floor but had merely been hurled across the room! Terrified we clung to each other until Dad fought his way outside and in the murk and gloom and smell of dust and escaping gas, saw that the three houses on the next block to ours were demolished. Uncle Tom lived in the third one of these.

Dad and the Rescue Services dug furiously all that morning for survivors and eventually found Uncle Tom under the ruins of his staircase. He was still alive but in a very bad state with a broken spine and multiple injuries. The four people in the house next door to him were all killed in the blast. He was taken to the North Middlesex hospital and, after a very long period, recovered sufficiently to resume living in the same house when it was completely re-built after the war.

His little car was crushed and broken but I believe that Dad and he worked on it to make it roadworthy because I still have fond memories of the little black Morris CMC 317 chugging around the neighbourhood after the war finished.

Needless to say we were evacuated again (complete with a huge box of shrapnel, bomb casing and shell caps which we gathered as souvenirs and from which we could not be parted) and did not return to London until the V1 and V2 rockets were about to reign down on us.

Such is life (and death)!

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