大象传媒

I must have been 5 or 6 and my first recollection of the war was of seeing my father digging a very large hole in the small back garden of the victorian terrace house in Stewart Road, Temple Mills, Leyton E15 in which my family had lived for many years. My father had been in the Great War and so he decided that to make sure we would be safe from blast he would make the hole deeper than was recommended. My next recollection was of a tiny mound of earth with what appeared to be a small ladder leading down into its depths.
My next recollection was being inside the Shelter during an Air raid. The inside had two camp beds, one small cupboard. and various other items. All to try and make the Anderson as comfortable as possible. My Mum always seemed to have some stew or broth simmering on the cooker in the kitchen and when the air raid siren sounded we would all troop down to the Shelter with our own personal belongings. Mum would take the pan of food with her along with the tilly, whilst Dad would wheel the old pram full of bedding and all manner of objects including all the photos and certificates, Insurance policies etc.
We would sometimes be in the shelter all night. but if the street was bombed then Dad would leave us and go to help the fire service and wardens to clear the casualties and bodies out of the ruins.
We used to have a little game in the shelter of trying to identify which planes overhead were ours. You could tell the difference by the sound of the engines.
Ours had a steady sound whilst the German planes sounded as if the engines were out of tune.
Sometimes we would sit in the shelter in the dark and watch the search lights trying to find and then silouete the enemy plane. The ack ack guns would be firing over on the Hackney Marshes and we could hear the thud of the distant bombs landing. Sometimes we could see the night sky illuminated with the fires from the city and the red glow which seemed to cover the whole of the sky. One night there was a terrific explosion at the bottom of the street from the shunting yards where there was a barrage balloon post, I think one of the balloons had been hit. It shook the whole street. I remember that we used to go round the streets in the morning before school, collecting the shrapnel that had appeared overnight. I think we used to take it down to Leyton townhall and put it in a large container of some sort and I think we got some money for it. We all used to play in the ruins higher up Stewart Road where the whole of the cross roads had been demolished by bombs. My own Grandfather had been asleep in one of the under table shelters in his house I think it was 79 Stewart Road. The whole house was demolished and he was found quite safe and well although covered completely in dust and glass,inside this shelter and later helped with the clearing of the rubble from the site. He kept all his family possessions in a small suitcase made from a material similar to cartridge board and after the house was cleared they found the suitcase completely intact under the remains of the front door.
We came out of our Shelter one morning to find that part of the front of the house had taken a hit from shrapnel and flying masonry from the houses across the street. At this time I think the blitz must have been at it's height and so for many nights we would take the old pram containing all our worldly possessions along Leyton High Street to the underground Tunnel between Straford and Leyton and there we would find that the entrance to the tunnel was filled in with sand bags but with a blast wall which we walked behind to get into the tunnel. Mum and Dad would find a spot and put down some bedding and pillows and such and we would spend the night in there and I would get up in the morning to go to school never having heard a thing. My Mum would be very upset and extremely nervous when we came out and would keep cuddling me all the time. The damage to the houses near and around us was too near home for comfort so my parents decided that I should be evacuated.
My next recollection is of standing on Stratford Railway Station with my gas mask and little suitcase. I was with the children of the Spencer Family who lived across the road. Ronnie Spencer was quite a bit older than I, so both he and his sister looked after me. We went to Harlow. I hadn't been out of my area before so it seemed like we were going to another world. Harlow was a small farming village with only a few houses , a church ,a school and a pub. We stayed in Potter Street, I recall that there was a pub at the end of Potter Street with a huge whale bone arch leading to the yard in front, We were fascinated by this object having never seen anything like it before and we would walk down the street and stand in front of it.
We were "billeted" in a Bungalow which was part of a smallholding belonging to a family called Higgins. Uncle Bill (as we called him) was a cheerful man and he and his wife Ada made us feel part of their family. He had two grown up daughters who lived in the next bungalow who used to take me out for walks and come and play with me. We used to feed the animals and help around the farm. We went to school down in the village and had to walk across open fields to get there. Sometimes we would lay on our backs in the fields and watch the dog fights in the sky above us and listen to the rat tat of the planes guns and marvel at the fantastic shapes that the vapour trails made in the sky as the planes dipped and dived. Unfortunately this idylic life didn't last long, perhaps a few months. Northolt airfield was starting to get bombed so my Mum and Dad came and collected me and took me back to the East End to live for a few weeks until shipping me and my Mum up to Elland in the Yorshire West Riding to live with my Dads Mum and Dad.
Dad had been born in Yorkshire in a little Mill village called West Vale. This is where we were sent to live. It was mainly one main long street with black stone woollen mills down one side and streets running up the hillside at 90deg to the main road on the other side. at the bottom of each street was a pub which used to fill up each evening when the mills turned out.There was the smell of oil and soot in the air and the workers clothes were always covered in a film of white fluff. The mill girls all seemed to wear scarves on their heads covering a head full of curlers ( not a pretty site) I remember that I still had my Eastend accent and I was treated by the other children as if I was from another country. So, very soon I started to emulate their way of talking and in a short time I was starting to sound like them. Each day at school we had an Air raid drill and had to put on our gas masks and go down the Air raid shelter at the bottom of the school playground.

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