大象传媒

Those nights spent in those Anderson shelters will remain with me forever the dampness cause by the condensation running down the walls plus the fact you had to share your bed with the odd insect or two.
I will never forget the night a small bomb fell in the next door front garden and the crater was found when Jim our neighbour fell in it,it was a small bomb but when my father pushed open the shelter door we were suprised to see the house still standing.
My next close encounter was with a V1 or doodlebug as they were called this one seemed to be going along nicely but suddenly decided to start going around in circles over the Z Batteries guns that we had in the park close by, I think I did a three minute mile that day.
The V2s or Rockets did such things as exploding on the way down and I remember one time when my mate Bob pulled a small child into the cover of a porch as the bits started to hit the roofs we were lucky that day but a short time after one landed about 150 yards from our house at six one morning,I found myself on the floor covered in plaster and after checking my mother and father were ok I got dressed and as I did so I could see flames lighting up the houses going downstairs I found the front door was no more and the front room window frame had blown in but the breakfast things were in the front garden(blast does funny things like that)
Going out I could see just how lucky we had been the rocket had landed on the only open space between the houses a small green,neighbours houses close by had lost the fronts and rescue men were getting people down from dangerous sloping bedroom floors the flames I had seen were coming from a fractured gas main which was burning in the crater.

No one was killed that night one woman lost an eye and another lad got badly cut by flying glass, the lack of casualties could have been due to the fact we were all in bed and lying down so avoiding more injuries from the blast.
A short time after this I became ill and have been on medication to this day.
When people talk of the war I do think they tend to forget the civilains who never got any medals or war pensions but endured a lot and still to this day have to live with it,One of the things that amazed me was how we were able to sleep with the amount of gunfire and then we had the Z Battery put into the park which was close by this consisted of sixty four guns each had two racks which held a rocket each and when they fired the whole area was lit up but the box barrage they put up soon had any aircraft fleeing.

In the latter part of the war these guns were manned by the homeguard so the troops could be used for the assault on France, many of these homeguard had been to work all day and had to go out all night as well,and people today say they are stressed, yet in those days I dont remember hearing the word mentioned.
In the early days of the war I was at school(until 1943) when you spend all night in the shelter and part of the school day it is a wonder any of us got an education but we did and we never had any one to counsel us after any bad days or nights.
When I left school in 1943 I went to work in a local gents and boys outfitters and one evening I had just got home from work when a doodlebug came over.when the engine stopped it fell in the road across from the shop where I worked so borrowing my dads bike I went back to find all the plate glass windows had blown in and stuck in the woodwork where we would have been standing were long pieces of glass,and one of the models we used for displaying clothes I counted forty cuts on its face, another lucky escape for me.

Well I could go on and on but I just wanted to show what some of us at home had to endure,having reached the age of 76 I consider myself very lucky to be alive having gone through that war,and my thanks must also go to the employees of the NHS who have also helped me to live to this age.

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