大象传媒

To Daddy with love.
It seems to me that my childhood memories of WW2 are most vividly tied up with the loss and return of my father. As a pre- war reservist he was recalled for training two months before war was declared in September 1939. I was 10 and my sister was 11 years old. After two home leaves my mother, sister and I saw him off from one of the big London stations for some unknown destination, the train was packed with waving troops as it pulled away.
Almost six years later and after the VE Day celebrations, the three of us went to bring him back home, as I remember from that same station. My sister was then 17 and I 16 years old.
All that we experienced on the home front during those six years remain indelible to us who were children,and the things we learned later from my father,(but more even from research after he died)must ensure that WW2 is never forgotten.

My Father, Driver William (Danny) O`Shea, RASC was sent to France with the BEF. On May 24 1940
he was captured during the `last stand` at Calais. He was reported "Missing in Action" for over a year and my mother was about to receive a widow`s pension. During this time we would look through the newspaper columns that would publish names of servicemen `killed in action`
One day I arrived home from school to find a strange letter-form on the mat with foreign writing and what looked like my father`s writing.
I opened it to discover it was a letter from my father. My mother had enlisted in `War Work` at a small factory nearby so I ran over to show her the letter. The whole factory cheered at the news. After this letters began arriving, some with pictures from the prison camps, one signed to my sister and I "From Daddy boy, with Love " This we treasured, and sent a picture of us both by the rose trellis in our garden,signed as above.
During those years my father was in six Stalags ( one a satelite of the dreaded Auschwitz)where tthe prisoners were sent out to work as `slave labour.
During my father`s absence a lot had happened on the home front which he learned on his return.
His parents home in London where he was raised had been bombed while they slept in the Underground to the extent they had to be rehoused.
His youngest sister had died aged 19 from TB due to the crowded sleepng conditionsin the underground.
During most of the war we three slept in our Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden as we lived in a London suburb. Towards the end of the war we felt secure enough to move back to our upstairs bedrooms. The V2 rockets had begun and in the wee hours one morning we were hit by one. My sister and I were wokened by the ceiling. collapsing on us. my mother`s room at the front had all the windows blown in, the roof lost most of the tiles and we could see the night sky. We couldn`t get downstairs until help came to remove the front door which had been blown on the stairway and the hall wall had to be rebuilt.Soldiers from a nearby army camp came the next day to board up the empty window frames and remove front rooms furniture which had been badly damaged. As a consequence we had to reluctantly return to the damp,cramped, musty Anderson shelter. As the war was eventually drawing to a close the Russians advanced towards the POW Stalags in Poland where my father was in 1945. The Germans marched the POW`S (On the infamous Death March") on foot or in cattle trucks down into Germany where wmy father was liberated at Mooseburg by Gen.George Patton. We heard nothing of his liberation or whereabouts until a policeman arrived at our house to inform us we must meet ana bring him home from the same London station we had seen him off.This was two month after his liberation and two months after VE DAY. Our first Christmas together As a family in 1945 is recalled as a very happy one. It was shared with two German POW`S stationed near our home as Dad said he "remembered how bad it was being confined in Stalags over Christmas "!

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