大象传媒

I was 10 years old when the war began in 1939. Our family lived in Sidcup in Kent. During the Blitz 1940 we moved en mass up to north Wales where we lived in a small village, largely to escape the bombing. We did experience some of the bombing down in Kent and certainly up in North Wales we witnessed the horrific bombing on Liverpool which we could see on the horizon from our house there.

My other memories of during the war were in 1944, when the doodle bugs the V1 weapons and V2 weapons were being set off and where we lived in Kent then it was very much on the flight path towards London. So we saw plenty of the V1 Doodle Bugs crashing and of course heard the V2 rockets going off.

I think as children, one tended to regard the lot of it as a good game, we weren鈥檛 terribly frightened. The only occasion time I did get a bit panicky was in Sidcup one Saturday morning up in the high street where I saw on the opposite side of the road I saw a police station and two policemen outside it were looking up at the sky and suddenly rushed into the police station behind the sand bags. When I looked up at the sky I could see one of the V1 rocket bombs in the sky, the engine had cut out which usually meant it was going to crash immediately for some reason this V1 didn鈥檛 crash straight away, it just drifted along a bit it and then landed about half a mile away with a very large bang

Of course there was nothing you could do about it one took it in ones stride. Another occasion time when I got a bit scared, also the time of the flying bombs when the anti-aircraft bombs were firing at them. I think it was the first day of the V1s.
I was out in the street, I had got no helmet on, I can remember cowering against the wall there watching the shrapnel bouncing on the pavement in front of me which was quite an eerie experience

The V2s were a bit more horrific because one had no advance warning of them. The first thing one heard was the very enormous explosion. The joke was that if you heard the bang then you know you were all right. The other eerie thing with the V2s, which one clearly recollects, is the fact that one heard the sound of them coming after the explosion because they travel faster than sound, so one heard the noise after the explosion took place.

The rationing, the shortages, things like bananas and oranges one can remember before the war but one just didn鈥檛 see in those days. We had a sweet ration that was very, very small, to children, that perhaps was more of a hardship than the bombing raids.

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