大象传媒

At the start of WW2 I was twelve, and just about to start my second year at Plaistow Secondary School in Prince Regents Lane, Plaistow. But the lessons didn't begin, because the day before the outbreak of war the school was evecuated to Weymouth in Dorset. I had refused to go, and after much argument, my parents reluctantly allowed me to stay. And stay there I did throughout the rest of the war.

I remember listening to the wireless on that fateful Sunday morning listening to Neville Chamberlain telling us we were at war. My mother cried. She remembered only too well that my father had served with the infantry in France during WW1, and narrowly survived with a wound in his head.

Almost immediately, so it seemed, the air raid warning went, and we scurried down the garden in a panic to the Anderson shelter.

After a while when all had been quiet, I escaped the clutches of my mother and went to the front door of the house. Along the street a few groups of people were standing talking. Suddenly an apparition appeared at the end of the road in the form of an air raid warden adorned in almost every bit of equipment he had been issued with, which made him wobble precariously on his bike. "Get in, they'll be here any minute," he yelled. There followed a slamming of front doors, including ours, as the street emptied.

A few moments later the all-clear went. It was to be almost a year before the full fury of the Luftwaffe was to fall upon us.

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