大象传媒

During 1942 to 1945 I was aged two to five years old. I remember the blackout; if we went out at night we had to feel our way along because it was pitch black. We would probably have been going to visit my grandma round the corner.

We used to go out to the shelter every night at the bottom of the garden, we had bunks inside and a candle. My dad was in a reserved occupation, a Dairy Engineer; he had to keep the milk machines going, and filling the glass bottles, and he had to drive all round repairing them. He used to go out early in the morning, and came home about 7.30 pm. Sometimes the men in the dairies gave him bacon, butter, eggs, Ovaltine or Rose-hip syrup. He wasn't supposed to have it, but they used to say to him, 'Have them, because you've done a good day's work. Put it in the bottom of your case, and cover it up'! He did get stopped by the police, they used to say, 'Let me see in your case', but whatever it was on top satisfied them!

I remember standing in the garden and all those things going overhead, buzzing, noisy, doodle bugs I think they were. The noise stops and you know they are dropping. One morning I woke up surrounded with glass, the windows had broken. A lot of houses in the street had gone, but ours just had the windows gone. Before that had happened we had had a little glass birdcage with a pretend bird in it, all made of glass, pretty colours, and it completely disappeared with that bomb shake.

My auntie, my mum's sister, was tending her back garden. A bomb fell into their road and she could see something had happened to her house, and she got in and she only had half a house, the whole front had gone.! She saw all her neighbours, the whole lot, the whole road, being pushed out into ambulances,dead. She had a lucky escape there. She lost her voice for six months with the shock. The council gave her accommodation with a Minister, the Revd. Simpson, who took her and my grandad in.

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