大象传媒

I was 12 years old in 1939 and remember the morning of September 3rd with absolute clarity. My father expected London to be bombed immediately war was declared, as had happened to Warsaw, therefore he had arranged for my mother and me to go to Aylesbury to stay with his cousin. The car was loaded with cases and bedding and we went into the house to listern to Neville Chamberlain on the radio. When he said "We are now at war" my mother cried and said "Its so soon after the last war" and I thought what does she mean, its ages ago. She was 38 and her father had been killed in the first world war when she was 16, now i too feel that 20 years isn't that long.
We stayed in Aylesbury for 3 months, there had been no airraids so we came home and lived throughout the Blitz spending our nights in an Anderson shelter and later when it flooded, under a table in the kitchen.
After Dunkirk when it was expected that England would be invaded a friend and I were going to Canada under the Commonwealth Evacuation Scheme but my papers were mislaid and our departure postponed, then the scheme was abandoned because two ships full of children had been sunk.
In 19** I was visiting Australia with my lifelong friend who had been evacuated to New Zealand and we attended a reunion of Commonwealth Evacuees.
There were various press cuttings and souvenirs on display and I read about the sinking of a boat going to Canada transporting children mainly from Middlesex and naming several that were drowned whose homes were in the suburb where I had lived. I think I may well have been on that ship.

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