大象传媒

One of the funny memories I have of WW2 - Bananas were very rare in fact you couldn't get any at all. I was about six or seven when my cousin Edie who was driver in the ATS and working abroad, maybe in the Middle East. My Aunt Lizzie wrote to her asked her to send some bananas. Edie sent a well wrapped package that contained two bananas. When it was opened the box was full off grass for packing but where the bananas should have been there was just the black marks where they had been. They didn't last the journey!

A more serious memory I have is of a barrage balloon near Horsely Cottages. I was walking with my mother and my two sisters. I was about seven years old, my twin sister Olive, and my sister Joyce who was 10. It was about teatime when we were walking close to a field where there was a barrage balloon.

Suddenly my mother noticed that the balloon had come too low so that the wires leading from the balloon had fouled some electric cables and ignited and the fire was spreading towards the balloon. The balloon then burst into flames and disintegrated fell into the field.

The heat was intense and we tried to go to look at it until my mother stopped us from going any further because the heat was so strong it would have burnt us to a crisp!

We returned later after the men from Ousten Aerodrome had put the fire out. The walls were all scorched and the plants and nettles were all burnt black, but they were burnt not by the flames but from the intense heat from the balloon!

We were very lucky not to have been burnt by this fire!

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