大象传媒

I was nine years old when war was declared and lived in the country on a four acre smallholding managed by my eightynine year old grandfather.He had two one hundered foot long greenhouses kept two pigs and two hundered free range chickens.The property was situated at the top of a triangle with Portsmouth at bottom right and Southampton on the left.
After the initial panic of collecting gas masks and putting up blackout curtains things were quite quiet for a while, then it started.By day I was watching dog fights as the Battle of Brittain got under way, and nights were disturbed by the wail of the air raid siren.
One night "Jerry" decided to bomb Portsmouth, Southampton and Eastleigh and all hell was let loose.
Mother shouted to granddad to "get up",Granddad replied "bu---r the Jerries" but got up and dissapeared into one of the greenhouses and sat on the hot pipes, no amount of cajoling would shift him. My father was fire watching on the church tower, so mother and I were on our own.
Our house dated back to 1620 and we had a cellar which my father had reinforced, but mother was claustrophobic and would not use it. Instead she grabbed an eiderdown and me and off we went to the "two holer dunny"at the bottom of the garden.
Sitting there we could watch the action through a small window in the door and could see the searchlights wheeling about. Suddenly they caught a Dornier in a three beam cross and the anti-aircraft guns opened up,we could also see red and green tracers lazily crossing the sky.
Mother was petrified, my thoughts were " well if anything drops on us now we shall be well and truly in the sh-t". Luckily nothing did but we had many similar hairy momments.Granddad suvived and lived to the ripe old age of ninety nine and my mother to one hundered and two.

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