大象传媒

I was very young when the war began and my memories are haphazard so many years later.
My mother had been a teacher before marrying and was forced to leave the profession on marriage by the rules of the time. She was recalled to the classroom as more and more male teachers where drafted into the armed forces. Consequently I was accepted into the local infant school at an earlier age than was usual so that she could teach in the adjacent junior school. The schools were within a mile of Tilbury Docks and my memories of the effect of the war upon the school include having to practise putting on an evil smelling gas mask (initially I recall a Micky Mouse one and then later a standard issue) and then fighting for breath inside a rapidly fogging up face piece. We had to carry these with us everywhere we went, packed into a cardboard box and hung around our necks with string. I also remember having to file out of the school building, with all its windows criss crossed with brown sticky paper tape, into brick and concrete blockhouses which had been erected in the playground. Inside were rows of concrete benches on which we were perched until the All-clear sounded. They were cold and gloomy and sinister places to we children.
Out of school I can remember roaming across the marshes between the school playing field, which was some way away from the school, and the docks, leaping across the dykes which drained the marshes, and searching for shrapnel.
In the early days of the war my father and his friends had dug an air-raid shelter at the bottom of our garden and when the warning siren sounded at night I was escorted from my bed, with an eiderdown wrapped around me, to the security of a lower bunk in the shelter. During the day, if not at school, I would patrol the garden and street wearing a tin helmet, but always ready to run for shelter if necessary. I would listen for doodle-bugs with their distinctive harsh engine noise. We children knew that if the engine stopped we had ten seconds to get to safety and would run for shelter counting as we ran! Later our family was issued with an indoor shelter which was erected in our front room. My father, as a science teacher in a seconary school, was not called up to the armed forces but served in the Home Guard and spent some time playing cards in the board room of the local dairy and some time out on the marshes guarding the Docks. On one occasion he was out with the Home Guard but had left a quantity of live ammunition at home on top of the Morrison Shelter. My mother and I were sleeping in the shelter when the alarm siren went off and German bombers dropped a batch of incendiary bombs on the town. One came through our roof, through the loft, through the upstairs floor and fell in our hallway just on the other side of the wall from the shelter and its cargo of ammunition! My mother moved quickly from the shelter to the hall and, opening the front doot, threw the bomb into the front garden. Luckily it was a dud and didn't go off. The next day my father retrieved the bomb and took it to his school where he dismantled it. The tail fin had been mangled as the bomb came through the house so he found a replacement from another bomb which had fallen on his allotment. The decommissioned bomb is still in my possession and has been shown off at my grandchildrens' schools fairly recently.
We were lucky as a family because our house suffered minimal damge during the war. We had windows blown in when doodle-bugs exploded in the town but, considering our proximity to the docks which I could see clearly from my bedroom window and our nearness to London, this was nothing to what some families suffered.
In the latter stages of the war I remember standing at the side of the arterial road through Grays and watching invasion vehicles make their way to their embarkation points, their caterpillar tracks tearing up the tarmac on top of the concrete roads as they went. Eventually I was presented with a chunk of white rock together with a label stating that it had been caught in the tracks of a landing craft during the Normandy landings.
The end of the war almost seemed an anticlimax.

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