大象传媒

The day the war broke out I was walking in Ipswich with my brother and evacuees were already arriving from London. The first night when the sirens sounded for the first time I can remember sitting with my brother in the hallway wearing our gas masks. Before we were evacuated we visited my granparents and it was there I saw a barrage ballon for the first time, pulling back the curtains in the morning I thought it was an elephant. At around the age of ten I was evacuated with my brother and stepmother to my father's parents in Birmingham, for he was originally from there, he was in the Royal Navy. After a while my stepmother left us there, for she had to go to Scotland to be with my father, for he was badly burnt in action. After school we went straight to my aunts and then into the airraid shelter. A girlfriend and I use to enjoy going home in the evening and shouting at the people who blackout was poor, put that bloody light out. It got so bad in Birmingham we had to return to Ipswich, on the train home we had to stop just outside of London, the reason being London had been hit by thirteen doodlebugs. The journey was a bit of a nightmare, for a sailor was tormenting my stepmother, then she realised the baby she had on her lap hands had been slashed, we were moved to another carriage. Once back in Ipswich one evening we had all gone to bed and we heard the whine of a doodlebug, so we got up to go to the shelter and my brother and myself were blown down the stairs by the explosion, this was near Ipswich Airport. One of my aunts was bombed out of home in Campbell Road by a doodlebug, I think she was one of only two people in Ipswich to be affected this way.
When in Birmingham my grandparents street was totally devasted by a bomb attack. They were lucky to be alive, reason being they had a whippet and the dog rushed around to another relative who then rushed around to find them buried in the air raid shelter.
When the war was finished I was working at Churchmans cigarette factory, when peace was declared I was in work and did not know of it till next day. I was only fifteen at the time, but I celebrated on The Cornhill. Then I left and put up my age and went into The Land Army for three years.

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