大象传媒

My mother visited us in Hortham Hospital, and I asked her where my father was? She explained that he was busy, and so I lay in bed at night believing that he was too busy to see me. Later on I heard my mother whisper that 鈥渢heir dad is dead鈥� to another patient. He had been blown up in the street. He was one of the first bodies that they found on top of the rubble in John Street, in Easton.

One of the nurses asked me to post a letter for her. By now I had no clothes of my own only the clothes that were given to me by the hospital. The post box was just outside the main gates and the gateman stopped me. Thinking I was an inmate and trying to escape! I explained that I was being sheltered in a house on the complex and he realized his mistake!

I returned to John Street some five weeks later the hole that had been caused by the bomb has been filled in. I was told that it was so large you could fit two double-decker buses in the crater. Some of my friends and neighbours had died there that night.

I went back to school at St Gabriel鈥檚 and during the daylight raids we went to Hemming鈥檚 Yard underground shelters, which were situated across the road. I remember on one occasion just before I entered the shelter I heard a loud droning sound. I looked up at the sky and it was black with German aeroplanes. This was the day that they came to bomb the Filton airfield. There was 200 to 300 aircraft that day.

We now lived in Chaplin Road in Easton, and so I was evacuated to Newlyn seven miles from Newquay. Transported by train, I stayed there until my mother visited; I would not let her go back without me. So she bought me home. The reason I did not like it in Newlyn was because I had to fetch water from a pump in a road. We had to go to church three times on a Sunday just so we were out of her way. The air raids were still as bad as ever and we used to shelter in the Labour Exchange situated in Woodborough Street, Easton. We went through the streets and could still hear the guns and explosions. Although I was a child I still shook with fear.

I started work during 1944 at the age of fourteen. I worked for the Great Western Railway at Temple Meads station in Bristol. I saw the troop trains and prisoners of war and other celebrities, such as Winston Churchill, Laurel and Hardy and Tom Micks the famous cowboy. My hours of duty 6am 鈥� 2pm, 2pm 鈥�10pm and 10pm 鈥� 6am. I also delivered parcels after the war by horse and cart.

The bombing in Bristol had stopped, but the troop trains came back. The Dunkirk veterans came back and were put into tents in Eastville Park. We asked them for souvenirs and they emptied their pouches for live ammunition, which they poured onto the floor and we scrabbled to pick them up. Unfortunately when I took them home, my dad who has been a sergeant stretcher bearer during the war and took them off me and gave them to the police. (It was some other family鈥檚 father that she had referred to earlier in the years when I was a child in hospital).

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