大象传媒

We lived in Southampton during the war. Because the port was under such frequent bombing, I was evacuated to Wallis. The lady I stayed with had a son on HMS Hood, and when that was sunk she was naturally very upset. I was therefore moved to a new home. I didn鈥檛 like this one very much, and one day I cycled back home to Southampton. I had to wait outside the house because my mum was out at work. Within two hours of her getting home, I was on a train back. Not long after though, she realised I was unhappy there and brought me back.

In our garden we had an Anderson shelter. When these had been introduced at the start of the war, they had been voluntary, and the family whose garden backed on to ours hadn鈥檛 wanted one. When the bombing started, they used to ask to share ours. One night, when I was about 13 or 14, there wasn鈥檛 enough room in the shelter, and the neighbours father, son who was back for the night from the local army camp, and I stood outside the shelter watching the bombing. Our house was hit. The father and son standing next to be were both killed. I clearly remember the son cried 鈥淥h Mum鈥� as the house was hit 鈥� we all heard him. I escaped without a scratch. The next morning my mother and I got on a train. We didn鈥檛 know where we were going until we got off at Wincanton in Somerset. The raid we had witnessed was apparently one of the Germans鈥� trials of their fire bombs. They had targeted the water pumping station, with the result that the firemen soon ran out of water for putting out the fires, and had to just watch everything burn.

My father spent the war in the merchant navy. Is ship was once torpedoed and sunk, but he got back in one piece in the end. Likewise, my elder brother who had been in the TA before the war, joined REME and spent time working on tank recovery etc. He went through the whole war, including service across northern France and Germany, without seeing a single bullet fired in anger.

I remember in Southampton we used to watch the bombers fly over. You would often see about seventy German planes flying in. Then the spitfires would arrive. But there were never more that three of them. They always drove the Germans back out to sea, and would then fly back and do a victory roll over the town. Sometimes, only one plane would come back, but they would still do the roll. Our morale was quite low at the time, and the victory roll always made us feel that bit better. One thing to note; many of the parts for the spitfires were actually made in peoples garages and then assembled later.

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