大象传媒

Here I am in 2005, in my seventy third year and looking back to the war years as if they were yesterday.
I was born in 1932, a Hoxton child, the youngest of five children. Hoxton at that time, like the whole of the East End, was home of the unemployed. The men who fought in the first world war came back to the promise of a `land fit for Heroes`, but were immediately thrown onto the scrap heap. I can remember ex-soldiers turning their hands to anything legal or illegal; East Enders and all will remember Daddy Burtt`s who fed many children and soup kitchens were a life saver. Charities did what they could but poverty was rife and the fear of calling a doctor to a sick child every family`s fear. My parents lost two children for the lack of money. My father along with hundreds of others would queue for hours for a day`s work; if they were turned away it meant their families went hungry. It was only after the second world war that the class structure altered, no longer the rich would get richer on the backs of the cheap labour of the unemployed. It wasn't perfect but at least you felt that someone cared. So, by the end of the second world war, with the election of a Labour Government the National Health Service was born.
What we did have was a tradition of the yearly trek to the Hopfields; the one chance for children to get a breath of fresh air and freedom in the countryside. This was the one time we could say we had a holiday. But this is not a story about hop-picking; this is the story of one small girl who went hop-picking in 1940 and may not have come back to Hoxton.
September 1939 came and went quietly only broken by the testing of Air Raid warnings which frightened the life out of me. I had seen the posters "War in Warsaw" so I knew what was coming even at the age of seven. So August 1940 came and we had received our card from Mr. Honey the Hop Farmer in Nettlestead Wateringbury Kent. The Hops were ready early so off we went via London Bridge to Wateringbury and Diamond Place Farm. We had settled into our little hut (all cleaned out with fresh wallpaper and strawbeds with curtains around). We had started pulling the bines and picking the hops when there was a flurry, grown-ups rushing around telling us to take shelter. the Battle of Britain was in full swing above our heads; men and boys rushing around armed with all manner of sticks, poles and pitchforks they could lay their hands on. So, the battle progressed and faded away. Our farmhands had dug a trench for us but that was back at the huts. Later in the war there was also an ack-ack division on one of the fields and the tracer bullets at night was just like Guy Fawkes night.
Later in the week I was on an errand to a little shop at the top of a hill near to the pub "The Hop Pole"; I was on my way down, back to the huts when I heard an aircraft coming across from the Medway, at the same time, a Petrol Tanker was coming over the brow of the hill, heading down towards me. I ran into a tiny copse of trees by the side of the road and crouched down at the very back among the undergrowth. In the meantime, the tanker driver had jumped out of his cab and ran into the copse, not many yards away from me, I don't know whether he had seen me but we were both in fear of our lives as the Me 109 sprayed us with bullets, missing, thank goodness the petrol tanker. In a split second I looked up through the trees and saw the pilot looking down at his failed attempt; he seemed to be looking straight at me; strange feeling of eye contact. Luckily for us he did not make a second attempt; the tanker driver jumped back into his cab and he was off. I came out of my hiding place trembling and was unfortunate enough to sit down on a tussock which turned out to be an anthill! I literally flew back to my family at the huts and when I arrived my family were being informed what was happening back in London. Even at the age of eight I felt that I couldn't burden them with my lucky escape, so I told no-one. In fact it was forty years later that I told my brother of this episode. (he was in the Air Sea Rescue during the war).
So, apart from spending almost a year as a family in Blackpool we spent each hop-picking down in Kent. I had seen the glow from London burning from Kent and later in the war, once again a German plane took aim at me whilst gathering potatoes with other children and women. Luckily he missed once again. As did the Doodle Bugs in the latter part of the war when we were in the firing line once again.
We had been bombed out of our top floor tenement in Pitfield Street and were rehoused in a top floor flat in Whitmore Road; we decided that the brick built air raid shelter at the bottom of the flats was no sort of shelter and we spent many nights of bombings in our flat, but sometimes sheltering in the passage. A landmine had flattened whole streets of houses in front of the flats; but they stood unharmed.
It would take a book to relate all I have to say about this time. But I come to the conclusion that the hard life my family had faced together, made us strong together, and brought us through... if you don't expect the world then you're not disappointed when it turns its back on you.

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