大象传媒

I was born in April 1934 and was 5years old when war was declared. That very evening the sirens sounded and we thought we were about to be bombed but it was just a practice and to let the public know what the sirens would sound like.

After quite a time the Blitz started and the family sent my mother, grandmother, baby sister and me to Babecombe, Devon. We came back from there briefly for the wedding of my cousin who was marrying a soldier who had been or who was to be at Dunkirk.

I remember getting off the underground train with my Mother and having to pick my way through masses of people, who had come to shelter for the night, sitting or lying on the ground on eiderdowns and blankets on the platform.

When the bombing seemed to have ceased in 1942 we came back to Streatham, London and lived on the second floor of a strong concrete and girder constructed block of flats which had been built just before the war. Its pavement level shops had been converted to public street shelters.

At first when the V1 doodlebugs started coming over we sat in our hall which had no windows. Neighbours from the sixth floor came and sat with us. It seemed very jolly and sociable to us children. We slept on the floor on eiderdowns and the adults remained on the chairs. However Streatham and Croydon began to suffer many hits as the rockets fell short of the targets of central London and of course Croydon Airport was still an aerodrome together with Biggin Hill.

For a short time we then went down to the street shelters under the flats. There were three-tier-bunks which again were a source of great fun for the children. However we realised all was not fun when my Father came back from his duty with the ARP one night and said that several buzz-bombs had fallen on a nearby street of houses and that the local Locarno ballroom had been opened up so that they could lay the injured out on the dance floor.

During this time I was going to school which had come back from being evacuated during the Blitz. Lessons were continually interrupted by the sirens and we would all troop down to the basement and wait until the All Clear. None of we children seemed to mind this at all, we were pleased to be skipping some lessons. In spite of this and three changes of school in this period I managed to get a pretty good education, taking my School Certificate (now GCSE) after the war to the accompaniment of the cement mixers and builders who were rebuilding a bombed wing of my school.

We children were told that if we were caught in an air raid on our way home from school and we heard a buzz bomb stop buzzing overhead we had to lie face downward with our stomachs raised off of the ground and our arms over our heads. Fortunately we never had to put that drill to the test.

Once the V2's began to come there were no warnings and no sound before the explosion. Things got very bad and the adults said that Hitler was throwing everything he had at us. Again we were sent away from London to Brighton and we rented three pre-war holiday bedsits which had a cupboard in each containing a sink and a gas ring. Accross the road was an Army billet for the soldiers who were manning the guns along the Brighton front trying to shoot down the buzz bombs into the sea. They were not very successful. However they let my little sister and me sit on the sandbags surrounding the gun emplacements in the quiet periods and were very generous with their sweet ration. When the American forces came they were also very generous and I trained my then 4 year old sister to say "got any gum chum" which did very well.

I want to pay tribute to the adults surrounding me, particularly my Mother. Because they did not display fear even when we could hear the bangs and crashes and explosions and my Mother did not show how worried she was about my Father in London, at one time fire-watching on tyhe roof of the Strand Palace Hotel when it was hit while we were away from London; we children felt we were engaged in an unusual and exciting adventure and did not feel fear. My Mother's preoccupation with keeping everything as normal as possible is summed up by the following incident:-

My Mother cooked proper meals in Brighton, veg and all, on three gas rings, one on each floor of the house and so was always running up and down with pots in her hands. One day after the D Day landings, the caretaker knowing that we had a radio, stopped my mother who was pot in hand as usual and asked her earnestly "Have they got Brussels"
My Mother replied "no this is cabbage"

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