大象传媒

I was four when the war started and we lived in West Wickham. Because my grandfather was confined to bed my family moved in with my grandparents so that we were there to help in case of any emergency.
I remember the nights of bombing (fortunately nothing hit us) and sleeping on the floor under my grandfather's iron framed bed, but one night I was terrified by a huge spider walking out of the fireplace towards me - after which I slept on a bed being more frightened of spiders than I was of bombs! One day I was out walking with my grandmother when a raid started and we took cover in the Railway Hotel by the station and I can remember that the back of the building was missing following an earlier visit from the Luftwaffe. Early in 1940 my father's offices moved from Central London to Forest Row in Sussex. and the whole family moved there shortly afterwards. For the next four years we lived in succession of rented accommodation in the village and the war largely left us alone. My father was in the Home Guard and always (it seemed) out on manoevres of some sort. He often brought home weapons of various sorts and I can remember finding and loading a .45 Webley revolver when I was about nine; needless to say, I did not pull the trigger while the gun was loaded! Mum joined the WVS, helped out in the Toc H cafe in the village and with other activities and I can remember helping her tie fabric strips on to netting to make camouflage nets. There were troops billeted in the village and nearby on Ashdown Forest and in 1942 I was knocked down by a Canadian motorcyclist as I tried to cross the road while a military convoy passed through the village. For the next few weeks the Canadian (Lance corporal Jones) was a frquent visitor to our house checking on my recovery and providing goodies in the form of sweets, cigarettes and various tins of food otherwise hard to come by. About the time of the ill-fated Dieppe raid he, and all the other Canadians, disappeared. Despite the war I had an enormous amount of freedom. Ashdown Forest was my playground and, apart from being warned about "Butterfly" bombs, (about the size of a tin of baked beans with rotating wings attached)I remember few restrictions. If only it could be like that now.

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