大象传媒

Those nights spent in those Anderson shelters will remain with me forever the dampness cause by the condensation running down the walls plus the fact you had to share your bed with the odd insect or two.
I will never forget the night a small bomb fell in the next door front garden and the crater was found when Jim our neighbour fell in it,it was a small bomb but when my father pushed open the shelter door we were suprised to see the house still standing.
My next close encounter was with a V1 or doodlebug as they were called this one seemed to be going along nicely but suddenly decided to start going around in circles over the Z Batteries guns that we had in the park close by, I think I did a three minute mile that day.
The V2s or Rockets did such things as exploding on the way down and I remember one time when my mate Bob pulled a small child into the cover of a porch as the bits started to hit the roofs we were lucky that day but a short time after one landed about 150 yards from our house at six one morning,I found myself on the floor covered in plaster and after checking my mother and father were ok I got dressed and as I did so I could see flames lighting up the houses going downstairs I found the front door was no more and the front room window frame had blown in but the breakfast things were in the front garden(blast does funny things like that)
Going out I could see just how lucky we had been the rocket had landed on the only open space between the houses a small green,neighbours houses close by had lost the fronts and rescue men were getting people down from dangerous sloping bedroom floors the flames I had seen were cfoming from a fractured gas main which was burning in the crater.
No one was killed that night one woman lost an eye and another lad got badly cut by flying glass, the lack of casualties could have been due to the fact we were all in bed and lying down so avoiding more injuries from the blast.
A short time after this I became ill and have been on medication to this day.
When people talk of the war I do think they tend to forget the civilains who never got any medals or war pensions but endured a lot and still to this day have to live with it.

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