大象传媒

As a child I have memories of the Germans bombing Great Yarmouth, and being evacuated with my mother and father. My father, being an electrician for the local electricity board, was sent on war work up north to Newcastle to work for Tyneside shipyards. He worked on the "Anson" in Swan Hunters' shipyard. I couldn't be evacuated with all the other evacuee children who were sent away to safety as I had a stomach condition so I went with my mother first to stay with her sister in Edgware, Middlesex. Until the house got an incendiary bomb lodged in the roof, and then we went up north first to Huddersfield, Yorkshire, to my father's mother and sister. Then my mother got a live-in job as a housekeeper to two doctors, a married couple, just outside Oldham, Lancashire.

We returned to Great Yarmouth at the end of the war, in 1945, to find the house relatively intact, though the windows were blown out and everything was covered with a thick layer of dust.

I can remember the air raids and the sirens, and having to spend cold nights down in the Anderson shelter in our small front garden, which my father wired for electricity. I also remember one daylight raid when although the sirens had sounded, I was so curious to see for myself what was happening, that I disobeyed my mother to open the front door and look upwards to see a German plane so low virtually at rooftop level that I could see the pilots face looking down. These are my memories of the World War two.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.