大象传媒

My first memory goes back to the night when the docks were bombed with incendiary bombs and the whole sky was lit up.

My parents and I were walking our dog when the siren sounded and we turned to go back home. Immediately after the siren, we heard the German planes overhead and then, when we were almost home, there was a shrill screaming sound which was getting louder and louder. My father shouted; "It's a bomb" and we all ran as fast as we could to our front door, and as Dad fumbled for the key and opened the door, the screaming sound seemed to be chasing after us and we all fell into the hall in a heap. Then followed a tremendous explosion. The bomb fell not far from our home. My father gave me some sips of brandy to get over the shock. It was my first experience of a bomb and that kind of bomb, a screaming bomb was meant to terrify you.
I remember my mother putting up the thick black curtains at our windows to stop any light showing on the outside and my father putting sticky brown tape across the windows to protect them from bomb blasts.

At night everywhere was pitch black. No lights of any kind were allowed. We had a torch, which had a shade over the top so that it didn't shine upwards.

All the schools in London closed, and most children were evacuated. My mother didn't want me to go, so I stayed on in London. I didn't go to school for a whole year. Then one of our French teachers came back to London and she started giving French lessons at her home.

We lived in an upstairs maisonette, and during the blitz we spent every night huddled under our dining room table to get some protection if the roof fell in. I used to get stomach cramps from crouching under there for so long. Later we started sheltering, with our downstairs neighbours, in the cupboard under their stairs.

Eventually, brick shelters were built in the road with bunk beds in them. Each night at dusk when the sirens sounded, we made our way to the shelter with our blankets. I recall that the shelter had a leaky roof and, if you slept on a top bunk, you had to put up an umbrella if it rained.

My father was in the Police and was stationed in Clapham where we lived. He used to work four weeks at a time on night duty. Mum and I always worried for his safety as the bombs fell. There was also the danger of being hit by shrapnel from the four big guns on Clapham Common.

The noise was unbelievable with the sound of the aeroplanes, the bombs, and the gunfire, which shook our house. After one air raid, when we came back in the morning from the air raid shelter, we found a hole in the roof. A lump of shrapnel had come through and was embedded in the seat of my father's armchair!

The next day, after the night raids, I often went out picking up shrapnel from the streets.

My father would come home with awful tales of his rescue work. I think he needed to talk about it to relieve his stress. One night, when a bomb had fallen quite close to us, he told us that they had been taking arms and legs out of the trees.

He would come home with burned out incendiary bombs for us to see, and he had cut a cord off the parachute of a de-fused land mine and brought that home.

When the London blitz was on the siren would sound every night as dusk fell. It was a sound that tied one's stomach in knots with fear.

One night when Mum and I were crouched under the table, we heard a crash as something hit our guttering. We fled downstairs terrified, and when we opened the front door the whole street was lit up with houses on fire from incendiary bombs. The one which had hit our guttering had luckily bounced off into the garden.

During these raids there was also the constant worry that there would be a gas attack and so, of course, your gas mask went with you everywhere and we would often put it on to practise using it. I remember being very upset because my dog had not got a gas mask and I decided he would perhaps be protected if I put him in my wardrobe during a gas attack. I put a blanket in there and hoped the door was a tight enough fit to stop any gas getting in.

In the next road a large empty house had been taken over by the bomb disposal squad, known as the "suicide squad". The garden of the house was full of de-fused bombs and land mines.

As I said earlier, I had no school to go to for a year during the heavy raids, but when things quietened down a little St. Martins in the Fields High School opened up in Tulse Hill. It was a fee-paying school, but I and four other children in the area were told to go there. As we were scholarship children we were the only children whose parents did not pay fees, which made me feel a bit of an outcast. I was there for over a year.

Then my old school was opened under the new name of South West London Emergency Secondary School and all the children from quite a large area who had not been evacuated went there. I was then fourteen years old.

To get to school I had to cycle across Clapham Common past those four big guns. I used to pray that there would not be an air raid when I was anywhere near them.

The memory of the school dinners remains to this day. Mainly we had salads consisting of grated raw cabbage, raw turnips, carrots and dried potatoes; and at almost every meal the pudding was semolina and jam!

When the sirens sounded we had to go to the sandbagged cloakrooms.

During this time another empty school in Clapham had become a billet for French sailors. On our way home from school my friend and I used to chat to them to try out our French.

American soldiers occupied a small block of flats near the common and several times we spotted one of our teachers on the arm of one of them.

Everyone had allotments at that time to "dig for victory" and part of the common had been allocated for allotments.

My father had one, and my friend and I took one on. We had to dig up the turf first which was a hard job. We worked on the allotment after school and at weekends.

Homework was quite a problem. Many times during air raids I sat on the doorstep doing it until the German planes were overhead, and then I would dash into the shelter.

One night a bomb fell in the High Road between Clapham South and Balham Underground stations making a huge crater. A bus came along and fell into the hole.

That was bad enough, but even worse, the bomb had penetrated the underground tube which ran along under the road and also burst the water main. The water flooded the Underground between the two stations drowning hundreds of people who were sleeping on the platforms believing it to be very safe down there.

My father helped in the rescue operation and bodies were being brought out for weeks afterwards.

My father had tried to persuade my mother to spend our nights on the Underground platforms. I wouldn't be here today if I had!

Later came the flying bombs also known as "buzzbombs" or "doodlebugs".

My first experience of bomb blast happened when I was walking down Balham High Road one day with friends. I looked up and saw a flying bomb above us. We prayed the engine would not cut out. It did, and it started to dive towards us. We flung ourselves flat on the ground and waited for the explosion. It landed very close by and the blast took my breath away, and glass was flying everywhere from the shop windows.

We took our School Certificate or Matriculation, as it was known in those days, during these attacks. We had desks lined up in the aisles of the sandbagged cloakrooms and we did all our exams in there.

It was very hard to concentrate. When the siren had sounded you were listening for the droning sound of a flying bomb and hoping it would pass over. The wait seemed interminable, hoping the engine wouldn't cut out. While writing one of my exams there was a tremendous explosion and my pen went right across the page crossing out all I had written. Afterwards there was the extra worry that my home could have been hit - and were my mother and father safe?

I don't think anyone passed those exams, not surprising under the circumstances!

I won a music scholarship and moved on to the sixth form at Mary Datchelor School in Camberwell where I re-sat the School Certificate exams & was successful that time because things were a bit quieter then.

At about this time the V2 rockets started falling. There was no warning with them so life had to go on with the terrible fear always with you that at any time one could fall on you or your family.

There was one outstanding occasion when, before coming home from school, we had heard a big explosion. When I got off the bus and started walking home there was broken glass and debris along the streets and the nearer I got to home there was more and more debris and damage. I dreaded turning the last corner in case it was our home that had been hit and I knew my mother would have been at home. Luckily we escaped with just blast damage.

Then came VE day. I think I was at school when it was announced that the war in Europe had ended.

We didn't have any street parties but what excitement and mainly relief that all our worries were over at last.

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