大象传媒

I was three when the war started, an only child adopted by a middle age couple. My parents never discussed the war with me so I had to make my own sense from what I saw and heared. We lived in a street of semi and detached houses, mostly Victorian. My first memory is of dummy bombs being dropped and maids in black dresses and aprons running out with buckets of water to put them out. I never remember any maids after this and now guess they were quickly called up.
On the corner of the road was a pig bin whch all the left over food were put. It smelt terrible and I held my nose if I had to pass it.
Men came with welding gear and cut down all the railings and gates. It all looked very bare.
My Father had mental health problems and was not called up but joined the special constables. My Mother put me in the shelter in the garden because she could not carry me down if there was a raid. One night I woke up terrified by noise and movement on my bunk. It took until I was grown up to realise that it was cats mating on the bed,I became very frightened of the dark - the back door seemed an impossible way away.
My father had a nervous bre3akdown and we went to Derbyshire where my aunt lived in the countryside outside Eyam. One night I was woken up to see a fire in the distance - Sheffield was burning. Later on we went to buy me a pair of shoes and all the paths were crunchy with broken glass. We helped with the harvest, gathering the cut corn into armfulls and tying them with string. One of the men was different from the others. He was a good worker and a nice man but I knew there was something different about him. Much later on my Aunt told me that he was an Italian prisioner of war.
Later on when pictures of the concentration camps appeared in the papers I tried to make sense of what I read. I was about 8 or 9 and could not understand how this could happen. It took me many years to realise that no one could answer so many of the questions I was struggling with. My war was quiet, no tragedy, no real dramas but it shaped my life in many ways.

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