大象传媒

I had come home for the half-term holiday from Carlisle (yes, we did! After 1940 we had an arrangement with Hitler, and came home from Evacuation for the school holidays.) My cousin met me at Newcastle Central Station and said "A bomb has dropped on your house - but don't worry, everybody's alright!" I suppose we must have travelled to Fenham on the tram, and once home I found our front garden full of smouldering feathers. This was the amazing story my Dad told me. A "stick" of incendiary bombs had been dropped over our street, completely gutting the house opposite. The bomb which landed on our house, however, burned through the roof, through the bedroom ceiling, through the featherbed and mattress, through the floor, through the ceiling of the room below, and dropped tidily into a large tin bath of sand, kept there for this very purpose. My Dad had thrown the featherbed out into the garden, and because "there was a war on" my Mother gathered up the feathers and made them into pillows. So we slept on pillows smelling of burnt feathers until the end of the war! I think this was in 1941, but no doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong. I also think this was the only enemy action over Fenham in WW2. My little brother received a slight burn over one eye and the local casualty station put a huge bandage over it - he was also their only casualty, as far as I know.

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