大象传媒

The landmine had fallen two roads away and we went round to look at the devastation and see if we could help. Our friend Frank had been injured and we were looking at his wrecked house. My mother wasn't with us but she went round later and commented that it was all like something in a foreign country. I occurred to me years later that she might have had Guernica in mind, the total destruction of a small Spanish town by an air raid in the Civil War. The event was made the subject of a famous painting by Picasso (now in the Guggenheim in New York, I believe).

I saw bodies being brought out of a house and laid in the road. The family's name was Mendoza - I didn't know them but as many hundreds of people lived in the area one could expect to know only a few.

Frank's wife Connie came on the scene and asked me to inform her older daughter Joan when she came home on leave from the WAAF. I was given instructions on how to break the news but when I met her on the way from the station and tried to tell her what had happened, haltingly and feebly, she chipped in with when did it happenf? She obviously knew the essence of it already.

Frank and his family came to live with us. They stayed for some months and then found accommodation elsewhere. He wasn't badly injured and continued with his work in the building industry, with part-time service in the Home Guard. He was a clever man and he chatted to me about inventing things and showing me how to carry out various tasks in our shed. He was working on a device for putting out incendiary bombs and we went on one occasion to his company's premises in Clapham, about 5 miles away, and watched the device being tested.

Life continued and we adapted, remarkably well I guess looking back. Bombs fell quite often and we spent most nights in our Anderson shelter. We slept in bunks and emerged in the morning and went about our normal business. My father worked for W H Smith in Central London, I went to school in Croydon and mother shopped and chatted to the neighbours over the garden fence. She must have spent hours doing that.

A later insertion, I learnt many years later that this pursuit was regarded as non-U (to use the post-war Mitford phrase). Some friends of ours (U people) lived for a time in a house with neighbours and they might see each other in the garden. The lady of the house told me that they would take pains to appear to have chanced to meet and talked briefly, taking pains not to appear to indulge in chatting over the garden fence.

Another piece of history came about during my schooldays in Croydon. There was a horse slaughterhouse near our school and horsemeat was sold in a shop in the main drag of the town (called North End). I would look at the bloody carcasses being taken into the shop with a morbid fascination but we never bought any of the meat, which sold well. Decades after the war I realised that I was watching history in that horses were being replace by tractors and huge numbers of horses were being slaughtered. I tried to imagine what it was like for the men who had looked after and worked with these animals. It must have been a terrible wrench for most of them. Horses were their world.

Going back to the details of day to day existence, there were no lights of any kind and walking even along ones own road was not at all easy. My father, like most people, carried a small torch which took a "No 8" battery - this battery was hard to come by and one would hurry to a shop if one heard that some were in stock. There was a similar chase after cigarettes and I would go to the newsagent and tobacconist in our road and get Player's for my father. Anyhow, back to the hand torches, there was an edict that so many layers of tissue paper had to be inserted in fron of the bulb and this I did carefully on my father's torch. The result was that virtually no light at all emerged and my father walked into a nearby pillar box one night and cut his lip. They was some sort of recrimination I recall and the paper was removed from the torch.

Everywhere was black at night. If there was no moon my father would say that it was "like the inside of a cow's guts" outside. We lived carefully blacked out of course. If one allowed even a chink of light to escape the shout "Put that light out" would be heard from nowhere at once. Many years later my son asked me whether the warden in "Dad's Army" (a brilliant concept by the way and with a good feel for the time) was accurate. "Not half" I laughed back. Certainly there was a certain type attracted to the ARP (Air Raid Precautions, later Civil Defence). Our gas masks had to be modified at some stage in the war as a precaution, as I understood it, against arsenical smoke. This had to be done by a certain date and I went along to our local ARP post. The warden gave me a roasting even though I was just in time.

Going back to the beauty which could be seen in the blackout, there was an occasion when, because of freak weather conditions, the Aurora Borealis (the Norhern Lights of course) could be seen. We stared up at the fasntastic display, sheets of light eppearing and rolling over and under. It was a strange sight but doubly so as our world at night was a world of total darkness.

Then came Dunkirk and there was fear of a German invasion. I lived in apprehension of such an event. German paratroopers being dropped from Junkers Ju 52 3m aircraft filled my thoughts and I had a continuing dread of such an event. The signal of an invasion was the ringing of church bells and I would listen hard and imagine that I could hear them. This type of aircraft looked so sinister and I was amused when, many years after the war, a German on holiday in Norfok told me that they called them "Auntie Joans", a kind of mother craft reference. How strange, I felt, that the aircraft could be seen so differently according to ones viewpoint.

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