大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War web site by Karen Elmes at the Building Exploratory on behalf of Ernie Trangmar and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Ernie was born in 1938 and lived at number 15 Templar Road in Homerton, Hackney. His earliest memories are of his grandmother refusing to go into an air raid shelter:

鈥淚 always remember my grandmother 鈥� when the air raid warning came on of a night time (it was always of a night time) and she鈥檚 sitting there 鈥� 鈥榥o bleedin鈥� German going to drive me out of my house!鈥� She used to get a little chair and a torch and a book and she鈥檇 sit in the coal hole under the stairs because the stairs was meant to be the safest place in the house. Unless they got a direct hit the staircase would take the brunt of any damage going down. Most of the places you always see the staircase still up but everything else was down.鈥�

The rest of Ernie鈥檚 family went to the bomb shelter on Homerton Grove and had a sing-song and sandwiches (which they made before going down to the shelter). Tea was made on a primus stove. Ernie remembers when a doodlebug dropped on Brooksby鈥檚 Walk. The blast from the bomb blew down the staircase of the shelter and blew him out of the top bunk where he was sleeping. When he woke up he had a lump the size of an egg on his head.

Ernie鈥檚 neighbour worked in a bacon factory and sometimes brought a side of bacon home. He thinks that nowadays it would be called thieving but then it was survival. They also used to have whale meat for dinner. Nothing was wasted, all waste was put into a bucket and put in the fireplace. It was a case of having to live by your wits.

Ernie used to help in a rest centre. It was in a local school (Homerton Row School) which was being used as a temporary home where people who were bombed out could stay until they found somewhere to live:

鈥淲hen people got bomb damaged they took them into the school, we called them rest centres. Ambulances used to take them there and they would stay there till someone found them somewhere to live. They would all sleep in classrooms and assembly halls and do their cooking and everything down there. We used to help the ambulance men take all the stuff upstairs 鈥� kettles, saucepans, whatever was going.鈥�

Ernie remembers how everyday life as a child in the war was an adventure. He can remember the barrage balloon on Hackney Marshes (which they called Winnie), playing in a damaged water tank after it had rained, seeing a taxi being pulled by a horse (because of the shortage in petrol) and collecting shrapnel and bullet casings (but he cannot remember what happened to them after the war).

This story was recorded by the Building Exploratory as part of a World War Two reminiscence project called Memory Blitz. To find out more please go to ^{About links}

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