大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Kathleen Lockett from Crawley Library and has been added to the website on behalf of Peter Walron with his permission and he fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

In 1940 I was only 8 and a half years old, but I have a very strong memory of seeing the first night of the Blitz in London. I was living in Greenford, which is high up and had views looking over the whole of London. The sun was setting at one end of our road, but looking towards London at the other end of the road we could see another red glow. At first we thought it was a reflection of the sunset, but the sun went down and the red glow carried on. We didn鈥檛 know what it was at the time, but next morning we heard about the bombing of the docks and the East End. We realised we鈥檇 seen the start of the Blitz.

In late October that year, my younger sister and I just missed being at home when our house was bombed. We used to come home from school for our lunch. Usually we went back to school at 1 o鈥檆lock, but for an unknown reason that day we left ten minutes earlier. We were halfway back to school when the air-raid sirens went off and we went to the shelters at school. When we came out, the school roof and all the windows had been blown in. My mother came to pick us up from school and told us our house had been bombed and that we couldn鈥檛 go back home again. I don鈥檛 remember being shocked or frightened. We went to live with my grandparents until my sister and I were evacuated to Princes Risborough. The whole of our school had been moved there, but at first my mother didn鈥檛 want us to go, like many other parents.

Eighteen months later, my sister and I were moved to a farm in a village called Northend in the Chiltern hills, where we stayed till the end of the war. I worked on the farm, as I was quite a tall lad. I can remember doing the haymaking by horse-drawn hay-rake. My horse was a Shire horse which was very large, but also very easy to work with in the fields.

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