大象传媒

My very first memory of the war is the first air-raid. I heard the siren with that terrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach which was to remain with me for many, many years. My parents went out into the street and stood, in company with all our neighbours, staring anxiously at the sky. I was only seven, and ran out after them clutching our gas masks, convinced that they were in imminent peril without them.

We lived near to the coast in South Shields, and bombs fell all around us: we were told that this was because the enemy aeroplanes had failed to find their targets on the Tyne, and would jettison their bombs as they returned home when they saw the sea before them. My two older cousins lived at the end of the street, and I remember them being carried by ARP Wardens into our air-raid shelter in the middle of the night wrapped in blankets to cover their nakedness. They had been in the bath when the siren went, and their mother hurried them downstairs and into their Morrison Shelter in the dining room just before a bomb struck the party wall between them and the adjoining semi-detached house. Amazingly, the shelter - which was just a steel box the size of a double bed - saved the lives of all three of them.

The end of the war was characterised by street parties, which at twelve years of age I found very exciting, and gate-crashed those in the surrounding streets; but my most potent memory is of my father, who was a River Tyne Pilot, and had been ordered to wear gold braid on his uniform to identify himself. This he hated, and I can still see him sitting with his jacket across his knee, unpicking the stitches to remove the gold braid the minute he was permitted to do so!

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