大象传媒

My mother, who recently died, often spoke about her life as both a child and young woman in Dover - otherwise known as Hellfire Corner - during WWII. Born in 1929, she was just 10 when war broke out and 16 when it finished.

She told us about several close shaves she had personally. There were many dreaded doodlebugs, but the one she remembered most of all was the one that landed in the next door neighbours garden (she said you would hear them, but the most frightening bit of all was when the noise cut out suddenly. You just didn't know where they were going to land).

On another occasion, while out walking a baby in a pram up a hill in Dover, a low-flying plane overhead got her attention and she looked up. It was German and he opened fire. She never understood it - there was nobody else around, just her and the child. It sounded like she would have put Roger Bannister to shame as she ran just ahead of him, the pram in turn flying ahead of her, several bullets ricocheting off the wall close behind. He seemed quite determined.

She said schoolfriends would suddenly not be at school anymore and you would later hear they'd been killed, but her mother would not allow either her or her younger brother to be evacuated. If they were going to die, she said, they would die together.

The iron railings outside her home were taken away to help the War Effort. I visited there in the late 1980s and still nothing had been put up in their place, although the holes where they were could still be clearly seen.

My mother remembered having soldiers billeted on them. One she remembered clearly as a nice boy who smoked Woodbines and was very handsome (he looked like Ronald Coleman, apparently), and she often wondered if he survived the war.

She remembered the POWs - held in quite a 'relaxed'way nearby - as always very friendly and polite, waving and smiling when she passed them.

She told us that, even though there wasn't a lot of money or anything else about because of rationing, etc., people then learned to make the very most of what they had and, with a bit of imagination, most things were possible. My grandmother (my grandfather had died before the outbreak of WWII indirectly from an injury he received in WWI) would make the leftover cabbage from one meal into the bubble and squeak of the next. They were hard times, but the more you learned, the easier it got. An Aunty I met many years later said that my mother was always "very well turned out".

She also remembered the camadarie, a neighbourliness that only seems to materialise when there is another enemy to concentrate on and she both loved the war and hated it.

Many years after the war, when I was a child living in Chatham in the 60s, there was a 'strange' woman who us children used to be quite frightened of. You could hear her behind her grey front door shouting - just shouting - and, knowing she lived alone, we all used to run past, thinking she was some sort of witch. She never acknowledged anyone, rarely venturing out, and still shouting on the odd occasion she did. Seemingly not to anyone in particular - I don't think she even saw us. Just the air. I remember asking my mother if she was a witch and she told me that she had lost her only child, a son and soldier in the War and her grief had 'turned her'. We were to leave her alone. I remember feeling so sad for her but, not convinced, I still used to run past. I wonder now if she was shouting at God.

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