大象传媒

I lived in Paddington during the Blitz, 1941-'44. I have early memories of air raid warnings going at school, and running with a bottle of milk down into the air raid shelter, sitting there for two hours, then going back into school. In the evenings during the '41-'42 period, as children of about 3 or 4, you would be woken up at 6 in the evening, get down into the Anderson shelter at the end of the garden, and lie there until 10 at night.listening to the noise of the bombing. One time, bombs were dropping in the next road - landmines which overnight wiped out 400 people in Paddington. You would lie there and then at about midnight, as the bombs came over further, you would find that the ack-ack guns would be outside your front door, blasting away until 4 in the morning. Not a very good start for a child who was going to school at 8 o' clock.
When you realised you had to answer the call of nature, you would have to run to the outside loo. On one occasion, my mother did this.and she was in there when suddenly the tip of shell came through, hit the wall, blasted, and dropped to the bottom of her feet. She waited until the shell was cold enough to pick up and then she took it in and we kept that as a memento. I still have it somewhere. There were some very, very sad times when you would go to school and one of the children would have to go home during his milk-break at 10 in the morning, and you would later find out that his father had been killed. And on other mornings you would be outside and you would suddenly see the telegraph boy arrive, and you knew that that meant that somebody had lost their father.
I later moved from London to Hayes in Middlesex where it was a little bit quieter. My father worked on aircraft during the war, building Mosquito planes. My mother was a diabetic, and as my father had to go to work, when I was only 8 years old I was the one who had to get my mother out of comas and also give her injections. Times were hard during the war and children often had to do difficult things but you just did them. It was only when you gew up and looked back, that you realised what you had experienced..

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