大象传媒

I was thirteen when war was declared, and can lay no claim to doing anything other than (like Talleyrand) surviving.

My mother was widowed in 1928 and I had two elder brothers. As war was obviously looming, they had joined the RNVR on HMS President and in the summer of 1939 were on their two weeks' training course, sent to HMS Coventry, an anti-aircraft cruiser. It turned out to be a longer period of training than anticipated; in fact, for several years we saw very little of them.

When they arrived on "Coventry", they were all given 24 hours' leave to say goodbye to their families as the captain had orders to make for Singapore. They must have been altered, as they were in Alexandria or maybe it was Athens when war was declared.

In the 1938 crisis we had all had a practice for "evacuation" and had taken packed cases to school, but it all came to nothing, as Mr.Chamberlaine came back with his "piece of paper".

When the real thing arrived it was during school holidays. The instructions I received from my brothers when they left was "look after Mum", so I did nto report for evacuation.

All the London schools were closed and my school became one half an ambulance station and the othe half a fire station. I did not attend any school for a year. As there was nothing of note going on during the "phoney war", a large proportion of evacuees were back home within a few weeks.

My mother heard that a teacher was prepared to mark homework for us at the local central school. This teacher had such a lot of applicants that the school was opened for any of the local schoolchildren, boys and girls mixed. We had just got going nicely when the orders came that any of us who had scholarships to secondary schools would have to go to the South East London emergency secondary school, which was Roan School in Greenwich for the girls and Colfe's in Eltham for the boys. We were none of us anxious to have a long bus ride to school and di not want to moe, but, as we would lose our grants if we did not, we had to do the commuting.

During all this time, we had two very old friends who lived in an isolated sort of place called Tatsfield and we used to go regularly every other week to make sure they were still all right.

It was quite a trek to get to them, as the bus route to Tatsfield passed Biggin Hill Aerodrome and the road was closed for security reasons. The bus from Bromley turned back at Leaves Green and the Westerham bus turned back at the Black Horse at Biggin Hill; thus we always had a long hike through Downe and round the golf course until we could pick up the reest of the bus route.

One memorable weekend we went on the Saturday and stayed the night with them. The hike round the airfield was very exciting that day; we heard much machine gun fire and planes were taking off with wheels only just above the hedge. I could even see the pilots' handlebar moustaches, but even though we were given a front row seat we had absolutely no idea what was going on. Our friends did not have a wireless, so there was no way we could find out what it was all about.

On the journey home the next day we were trudging round the airfield as usual, when we met a man on the same trip as us and he said he knew of a shortcut through the golf course. We went with him and in a little copse there was a hole and damaged trees. I said "It looks like a bomb has gone off". This the gentleman dismissed as "Nonsense! It must be left from the last war. (There had been no enemy activity here at all since Declaration.) I was protesting that the twigs were freshly broken when we came out on to one of the greens were there were little heaps of soil everywhere like the top of a pepper pot. I was curious and was approaching the nearest heap to investigate when there was a "phut" noise and the heap went straight into the air about thirty feet and came straight down like a fountain. We concluded that they were delayed action bombs to be avoided and we carefully made our way well between the humps. Four or five others went off before we reached the tent that was by the exit. At that, a soldier in the middle of a shave with soap all over his face emerged from the tent and said "You shouldn't be on here. I am here to stop people. It's full of delayed action bombs." To which I replied "Well, you need someone the other end too, don't you? It's a bit late to warn us."

When I got to school, my bomb story scoop did not stay exclusive for long. The next Saturday when Mum and I were at "the pictures" (the Granada, which is close by Woolwich Ferry), we had our first taste of the Blitz. The floor was bouncing so much it made our feet dance even while we were sitting down in the seats. People started running for the walls, but we stayed put as I did not think it was a good idea to get mixed up in that panic. The lights were turned on and the usherettes came on stage to sing to us.....the horrors of war! When it quietened down, the film was resumed and when we came out after having had our full ninepenn'orth, a scene of devastation met our eyes. Broken glass everywhere being swept up: blazing barges full of coal had been towed out into the middle of the river to burn out and huge fires burning on the other bank of the river. The margarine factory burned for a week with a huge pall of black smoke.

After that there were daily raids. So there was no more novelty in bomb stories and they became the bore of the century. Little did I dream that in sixty years' time even the 大象传媒 would WANT to hear them.

I did not discover until after the war that the German plan was to put out of action all the airfields defending London, then get all the Civil Defence stations before they started on the bomging proper. They did well too, as they got nearly all of the schools in Woolwich, mine included.

It is strange that it took so many years to find out exactly what had happened on that summer weekend in 1940.

Little did I know that 200 people died on the other side of that hedge while I was admiring the pilots' moustaches and dodging the unexploded bombs that had missed the target of the runways.

I had better stop there. There was an occasion when the school was narrowly missed and the windows shattered. As we were all a bit giggly, the headmistress thought it necessary to break out her emergency supply of Horlicks tablets and we were all given one each. We got off pretty lightly, as in this day and age we would have had to endure COUNSELLING!

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