大象传媒

When the War broke out in 1939 I was living with my parents on the outskirts of Portsmouth. I was one of four children, with two sisters and a brother. My parents decided it would be safer if my brother and I were evacuated to the Isle of Wight, to live with my grandparents. My grandfather had a nice house on the island where he worked as an architect, and it seemed life would be more peaceful there than in Portsmouth which was bombed heavily.

At that time the Isle of Wight Downs were home to large radar stations, whose purpose was to give advance warnings of german air raids. Unfortunately, in one German air raid, my Grandfather's house took a direct hit. It was believed that he had been in the house at the time.

My grandmother was a devoted member of the Women's Institute and had been at a meeting at the time of the bombing. Upon returning and discovering the house had been destroyed, she sat amongst the rubble and cried, believing my Grandfather to have been killed.

Luckily for my grandfather this was not the case. As my grandmother sat crying amid the ruin of the house, my grandfather strolled back up the road towards her. Although he had been in the house at the time of the bombing he had managed to scramble to safety, and had gone out to post some letters!

Regrettably, the shock of that day proved too much for my Grandmother, and within a week she suffered a severe stroke and passed away. Shortly after these events, my brother and I moved back to Portsmouth.

There was a farm quite close to our home and during the summer holidays my brother and sisters and I would go and work on the farm. We used to do things like spud picking, and I remember there were Land Girls working there as well.

During those years, I attended a Grammar school in Petersfield; a small town just to the north of Portsmouth. Every morning, my mother and I would travel up to Petersfield by train. If there were air raids in progress, there would be signs in the station, warning the passengers as they disembarked.

One morning, my mother and I got off the train as usual and were greeted by the air raid warning signs. We left the station and crossed the road into the High Street. As we were doing this, we heard a plane approaching. When I looked up, I could see it was a German Messerschmitt BF 109. It was flying so low that I could see the pilot's face as the plane machine gunned the High Street. It then flew on and dropped a bomb on the train track. If our train had been just a few minutes later, the bomb could have hit us. But fortunately, mother and I were lucky that day and we just missed it.

Due to the terrible bombings, that were taking place, students from Immanuel's College were evacuated to my school. In the mornings we used the classrooms, and in the afternoons, they used the classrooms. It meant that the teachers had to find outdoor tasks for us to do in the afternnons. Most of our time was spent doing gardening and cross-country running.

After you arrived in Petersfield by train, it was a half-hour walk to my school. In the winter when it snowed, there would be snowball fights between the pupils from my school and those from Immanuel's as we all walked to school together.

During the war, everyone had an Anderson or Morrison shelter. Anderson shelters were put in the back garden, and Morrison shelters, which were made from chicken wire, were put up inside people's houses. Our local Scout troop would go into people's homes and put up Morrison shelters for them. HOwever I remember that when there was an air-raid my family would take shelter under the stairs in our house rather than going outside to the Anderson shelter.

Unfortunately, a stream ran along the bottom of our garden, and this meant that our Anderson shelter was often flooded to the level of the stream. I remember that we had to have a pump to remove all the water. If we had to spend a night in the shelter, we often woke to find that we were up to our ankles in water!

Not far from where we lived on the outskirts of Portsmouth, was an RAF base called Tangmere. It was situated near Chichester, West Sussex. During the Battle of Britain, which lasted from July to September 1940, there was a particular weekend when my father decided that the aeriel fighting was getting rather dangerous. He told us all to get ready to go down to the Anderson shelter. To reach our Anderson shelter, you had to walk down the garden, along a pebble path. As we were just about to go down to the shelter, my father heard a plane comming and pulled us back into the house. As we watched, a German plane machine-gunned the path, and bullet holes appeared. It was a anotherlucky escape.

At the bottom of our garden, there was an artillery search light unit which was run by four men. On one terrible occasion, the light took a direct hit from a German bomb, and all four men were killed.They were very sad times.

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