大象传媒

Our family spent the school summer holidays of 1939, self catering in a former railway carriage at Barton-on-Sea Hampshire. I was aged eight and I can remember the daily, dull thud of naval gunfire which Dad said was from practice at Portland. Back home in Grange Park, London, N.21 I learned that my school was to be evacuated. I was glad that my parents decided to keep me in London. As we lived in the outermost northern suburbs away from the industries of the Lea Valley four miles to the east, they judged we would be safe enough. I was accordingly sent to Grange Park Preparatory School for two years. Run by two spinster sisters, the school incorporated a new two-classroom building and further space in the basement of their adjoining house where we were taught in a dimly lit permanent air-raid shelter. Here we enjoyed healthy dinners augmented by fresh vegetables grown in the garden by the sisters & their next-door neighbour, who was also a teacher and our cub-pack's Akela. Cubs met in the Methodist hall where the windows were covered in thick netting and where brick blast-walls were erected outside doors and windows to stop flying glass & other debris.
Air-raids were frequent in the early stages of the war and Dad built a subterranean reinforced concrete shelter in the back garden. The roof consisted of railway sleepers covered in asphalt & surmounted by an ornamental rockery (as disguise?) The interior walls were immaculately smooth as a neighbour who helped with the shuttering for the concrete was a a skilled carpenter. A curved flight of four deep steps led 7ft. down to the floor level. Dad contrived bunk beds and a wobbly table that folded against the wall. We used the shelter in earnest within a few days of the official opening. I do not remember much about the comfort or discomfort but do remember the anxiety of hearing the Anti -Aircraft guns nearby and the pulsing thrum of the German bomber's engines. The clearest memory of that shelter is seeing it after several nights of heavy rain; it was full of water and remained so for the remaining five years of the war. We later had a Morrison shelter in the house which provided a good base for the Hornby clockwork train set.
Walking home from school was always exciting because it was then that I would collect the bits of shrapnel that I had found in the street on the way to school that morning and which I had hidden in the front garden hedges of certain houses en-route. I never used the gardens of elderly gardeners as they would be sure to find my treasures as they clipped their privets.
In due course I went to Merryhills school. This was two miles away in a semi rural location and seemed to be a safe place until a parachuted land-mine destroyed six houses only 500 yards from the school.
In 1943 I ascended to the enormous, 1,400-pupil Latymers School in Edmonton. Here, the blast walls were twice as high & thick & during the less frequent air-raids we were assigned to sheltering under the reinforced staircases. School dinners were memorable as the meat, potatoes & cabbage became"old boots, soap & seaweed". We sometimes received food parcels from South Africa or U.S.A. & I well remember seeing & tasting dried, skinless bananas, very sticky but tasty. There was also chocolate powder which we queued up for to be fed two spoonsful each.
My father was exempt from call up but served as a firewatcher on the roof of the Regal Cinema in Edmonton which was a dangerous place and where he had many severe fires to deal with. At weekends, if off duty, he tended an allotment which kept us well supplied; there was some surplus for needy elderly neighbours. We kept half a dozen hens and saved all edible scraps which were minced up in the garage and added to our allocation of what I think was called "Balancer Meal". We produced more eggs than did our neighbours; this was because Mother talked to the chickens as if they were more children. Indeed they all had names and one (Hettie) regularly came into the kitchen and ate old tea leaves. We preserved eggs in isinglass & fruit in Kilner jars.
Father smoked like a chimney, unaware of health dangers: however it resulted in my collecting hundreds of cigarette cards. One day I sorted all the cards into sets and stacked them neatly onto a tray. The siren sounded an air raid warning and Mother called me to come downstairs. As I reached the top landing a German bomber dropped two aerial-torpedoes which I actually saw falling. They landed in the road parallel to ours and the explosion made me jump and drop all my precious, sorted cigarette cards down the stairs.
Later in the war doodlebugs became the main menace and one beautiful summers day as I was in the garden, I heard one approaching. Wih the knowledge that they did not fall until after the engine had cut out, I was not too alarmed even as it grew louder and nearer. However I was suddenly mesmerised to see this one coming almost straight for our roof and very low. It seemed to scrape the chimney and I clearly saw numbers printed on the fuselage and red & white lights below the engine casing. The whole thing was shining silver in the bright sunlight and the roar of the rocket-motor was
deafening as it passed only fifty feet away. It flew along the row of houses, seemingly climbing slightly to remain a few feet above the chimney-pots. Next day we learnt that it had landed harmlessley five miles away in the fields of Trent Park where Sir Philip Sassoon lived. The only damage to our house throughout the war was a small shrapnel hole in the asbestos roof of the garage. Many were not so lucky.

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