大象传媒

Like so many families we were evacuated from the city to get us out of harms' way for the duration.I can remember the train journey - with our cardboard boxes containing our gas-mask around our neck ( the trouble with these memories is that they are so often overwritten by the images seen on TV documentaries of the same events). I can remember the cold and dark station and the awkward process of being selected for 'billeting' with some local family,( to whom we were the type of people they had only heard about in tall tales of mischief in the city!)
Life was without a lot of the things that were part of our life in the city and the schools took a lot of 'getting used to'.
My most colourful memory was playing in the street in the West-Country town when a lorry full of Italian Prisoners of War came slowly past. They were a happy and cheerful lot and whenever they passed they would shout and try to make contact to remind themselves of their families at home. On this particular day they slowed down and threw a lot of bright, round objects out of the lorry to us kids. It took what seemed like ages for us to recognise them as oranges, something that most of us had never even seen due to our age and war-time shortages, then the scramble started, and I'm sorry to admit, that the donors were never thanked in our efforts to get one or more of the delicious gifts. I got two, and took them home to the family for the juiciest luxury we had that year
Thank you, Antonio or Julio whatever your name was, we got a different picture of 'the enemy' that day which has stayed for 40 years.

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