大象传媒

I can remember the boats coming to the River Stour going to collect the boys from Dunkirk. They went from all the different ports. I can remember the schools closing. We can remember on a Sunday morning we heard German bombers coming over and I could see them from my garden, I could see our fighter planes fighting the German bombers, they dropped bombs onto the Metropole Hotel which is now the centre of Lansdowne. They must have had information because in the hotel at the time there was a lot of Canadian pilots who had only arrived a day before. Also they dropped bombs on Beales, the department store in Bournemouth. I can remember you could not go onto the beach because there was barbed wife and scaffolding on the beach and they had pill boxes where the Home Guard used to keep guard at vantage points because Hitler was only across the water. Lots of families had Anderson shelters. In Christchurch Road in Boscombe, from Parkwood Road up until Corpus Christi school, concrete air raid shelters and sleeping quarters were built underneath these shops and local people slept in them at night during bombing raids. They must still be there but the entrances are probably still bricked up.

My father went away in 1939/40, stationed in Aldershot for six weeks and then went abroad until the end of the war. He was in the eighth army with the Desert Rats and most of his time he was in Italy, he was at many famous battles including Anzieo beachhead and most of his platoon were killed and injured so when he joined a new platoon they nicknamed him "Anzieo". One of his experiences was when he was in a pillar box taking telephone calls and his platoon retreated and forgot about him due to the amount of bombing going around, he realised and fortunately he escaped.

When my father was in Sicily, he could see the children there with nothing on their feet with hardly anything to eat so my father invited them back to camp and they sang in Italian and my father and the other boys in the platoon gave the children some beef to eat.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.