大象传媒

I was born in 1938 so all my earliest memories are of the war. I was never evacuated as my mother wouldn't split me from my brother who was four and a half years older than me. So we lived through constant nights in our Anderson shelter in the garden and many frightening days from the first raids to the V.I. and V.2 rockets which were even more deadly and frightening.
My first memory and this is really only one single picture, must have been in the night that London was on fire. I remember being out in the garden and my father had me in his arms. I remember how frightened I was because everyone around me including my big strong father was frightened too. We could see the glow in the sky even though we were thirteen miles away from the centre of London.
I remember very well the nights in the shelter. We would go down into that dark hole in the ground with a lamp, books and food. My poor mother would try to be calm but she had to leave her father in bed in our home as he was bed ridden.
The noise used to be unbearable I remember being totally terrified. My mother used to lay me on my side with one ear pressed into a pillow and with one hand over my other ear trying to protect me from the noise. We used to hear the planes over head firing and trying to bring each other down and one particular night two planes landed on the bus depot and destroyed most of the trolley buses. But for the four of us in that shelter was, sometimes, very special. Our parents were quite amazing, older than most, my father too old to go to war but so involved in fire watch etc. He had fought in the WW1. We talked and listened my brother and I and heard so much about our parents lives, my father was born in 1874, so his life was to us, (well loved and protected), quite amazing and so hard.
My mother had another worry as most of her family were in Jersey in the Channel Islands and she hadn't heard from them since the occupation and didn't know if any of them were alive, in fact she didn't know until the islands were liberated and I can see her now crying wth joy when she had the first letter from them. They of course didn't know about us and it was a great reunion in 1946 when I made my first trip out there to see my cousins.
School was hard. No excuse for being late and I remember so well being force fed with cheese pie, I was just 5, which I hated and promptly vomited it all up again once the teacher let go of my nose and mouth. Soon after that I went home to lunch but it was a very long walk especially as by then the day light raids were quite common.
The V 1s and 2s were the worst for me. I remember having to lay down on the pavement with my mother on top of me to protect me when the dreadful things were coming down. We were at a wedding once in Erith when one stopped right over the church, well it seemed so, the vicar stopped in his tracks and everyone knelt down and prayed hard, thankfully it went down into the Thames and we all got up and the service proceeded. My mother joined every queue that she saw and one wonderful day at the end of it was a packet of Cadbury's chocolate finger biscuits. I remember how she rationed them out between the four of us, my dear grand dad refused to have any and we made them last as long as possible.
Well, you might not want any more of this and I could go on for ages butif you want anymore I am quite happy to write.
Thank you for the opportunity, I know I wanted to do this for ages.
"Beatrice"

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