大象传媒

I was six when i heard the P.M. say we were at war, on the radio in my uncles flat. Everyone ran outside immediatley, expecting German bombers to bomb straight away - which of course they did not, although they made up for it later.

We lived in a flat about two miles from Tower Bridge. Opposite were arches under a railway line. The arch opposite our flat had been converted into an air - raid shelter and on one particular night we were staying at my grandmothers flat- everyone seemed to live in flats in those days and on that night a bomb went through the overheard railway line, into the shelter and exploded. The shelter/arch acted like a gun barrell, blowing everything, including what was left of the people there, into our flat. Needless to say, the flat was wrecked with rubble and human remains about 3 ft high. There were no windows, only gaping brick openings. My father took me around to the flat in the morning, to collect some items, not realising, of course, that it had been bombed. Later, he told me he was flabbergastered at the scene. He saw a cushion on top of the rubble, stained red and was puzzled but then he realised it was blood. He said he suddenly remembered me and saw me wondering off into the flat and i was standing on a dismembered hand causing one or two fingers to point accusingly upwards ( a sight i thankfully don't remember) He grabbed me and we quickly left. My parents never went back there so we lost everything. Evidently, the whole flat was smashed, including spots that my parents thought to be safe.
There is no doubt we would have been killed if we'd been there that night.

I remember staying at my grandmothers flat in Tooley street near Tower Bridge. On e of my uncles drove a tram on route which took him along toohey street. If the air raid was particularly bad, he would leave his tram along the street, and come into the flat. One night he and his instructor came in and had a cup of tea, they mentioned they still had a chap on the tram. My grandmother rebuked him for having left someone on the tram but my uncle said " It's alright - he's a stiff" Isuppose the raid had been a bit to heavy on the poor chap and he had had a heart attack.

In the same flat on another night, a bomb landed a bit too close for comfort and blew the door in. It landed in the hallway and so did a dazed policeman. He was promptly sat down and his composure was restored with some hot, sweet tea. He had been walking when he heard some bombs whistling down uncomfortably near and he jumped into the doorway of the flat for protection. The blast had blown him and the door into the flat.

The mornings were pungent with the smell of brick dust from the buildings bombed the night before. Even now, when i smell that smell of smashed bricks, i remember the blitz. It heralded new exciting bombed buildings to play in and a day of adventure to come. Of course, looking back it must have been dangerousbut at 8 years old i didn't realise. I could have been evacuated butmy mother would not hear of it- i was very glad - it was guy falkes night every night in our street. We hunted for shrapnel in the smoky morning from the previous nights barrage. My father had a job keeping me in at night because i would be out, memorising where bits of shrapnel had landed, by the sparks thrown up when they hit the ground, then i could collect them in the morning.

There was the fascination of going into a freshly bombed building. I suppose it was the silence and the emptiness where there had been noise and activity. I shall never forget one building in particular. It was a cloudy day and having clambered over the debris, i found myself in a long large factory room. I started to walk around this room, marvelling at the stillness and silence, when i suddenly felt very scared. I turned around and got out as quickly as i could. Imagination? or indegestion maybe, but all these years later, i can remember that cold fear and it still sends shivers down my spine.

My father had lost an eye as a child, through disease. Despite this, he had served in the 1st world war and, being to old for the second, he was recruited into the Auxilary fire service. He would come back laughing some nights because, with the smoke from the fires and only one good eye, he had not been able to see what was going on - he could see the fires, of course but very little else.

As an addition to the barrage, sets of guns were mounted on the back of lorries. These lorries, on some nights, would go hell for leather down tooley street with their guns blazing away. I think it frightened londoners more than it did the germans overhead. The sound reverberated loudly back from the buildings on either side of the road - the resulting sound being louder than the falling bombs.

I used to go to a picturesque, victorian school. It was one storey and small and i liked it. One morning, instead of being greeted by it's pleasant outline, i gazed in awe at a tangled mass of stone, brick and metal. A stick of bombs had reduced it to a mound of rubbish!

The second school i went to was also hit by bombs during the nightly air raids. I ended up going to a third school which had already been bombed. There was one particular area that looked interesting, but it was partially underground and was very dark inside. We were told by one of the boys, that this was all that was left of the school shelter. A bomb had gone right through the building and into the shelter, where it exploded, wiping out most of the school. Resources were scarce - i.e workmen, machinery etc, the shelter and its grizzley contents had been left - needless to say, none of us went back.

I was lucky enough to get into grammar school. On my first day there, i was allocated a desk on which there was a large blue and black stain. The master told me it was due to the previous pupil knocking over an ink bottle in his haste to get to a shelter. My arrival at the grammar school coincided with the arrival of the buzz bombs. We never went to any shelters in my day there, as there was no point once the rocket engine stopped you only had a few moments before the explosion and consequently you had no time to go anywhere.
You only heard the explosion if you were alive - if you didn't, you were dead!

When i first went to grammar school everything was makeshift, the classrooms were a mess and music lessons were held in the assembly hall. It was taken by a man called, of all things Mr Nightingale. The hall was gloomy, cold and very dusty - hardly surprising as there were plenty of bombed buildings around the school. During the lessons, we had pauses while the staccato, and the very sound of a VI rocket engine caused everyone to freeze until the, dare i say it, welcome sound of the explosionbrought the class and master back to 'normal'. We had to make do with the heavy oak and iron assembly seats- there were no desks. Mr Nightingale was a devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan and i still remember passages he made us learn by heart.

One of the first VII's (rockets)landed near my grandparents flat. It wiped out a catholic seminary, together with its compliment of monks and nuns. It was the only explosion that frightened me. I was about to get into bed when, without warning and in complete silence, the bed jumped a good few inches. This was followed by the sound of the rocket smashing through the atmosphere and exploding. It also split open a water main but we were above the level of the main so the water flowed away from us.

My father had an uncanny experience with VI. Every morning he walked the same streets to work but on this particular day he decided to walk the long way round, adding twenty minutes to his journey.

He was a halfway there when a VI landed exactly where he would have been had he taken his usual route. Even so, the blast flung him into the wall, but he was not hurt. Not so lucky was the thames tug that we heard about at the time. It was apparently hit by a VI that glided through tower bridge - i.e between the roadway and and the top span.The only trace found of that tug was a piece of deck plate on a neighbouring warehouse roof.

My grandmother was completely unaffected by the bombing. When the first wave of bombs droned in each evening, my grandmother would announce ' the bing boys are coming'. I think the bing boys were some musical act that she saw when she was young. Then amidst, all the bombing and whistling of the descending bombs, she would calmly say 'I think i'll make some soup'. Some evenings she would make a suety pudding.

This would be boiled in a white piece of cloth tied at the top with string. When cooked, the string would be cut and delicious slices of the pudding, covered with blackcurrant jam or treacle, would be served. The preparation of this pudding entailed the pateint, time consuming cutting up the suet into very small bits which necessitated the use of a long sharp knife, held at both ends, and a large wooden board all this accomplished while the bombs rained down. She seemed totally oblivious of the mayhem going on outside. One night an anti-aircraft shell, instead of exploding in the sky, as expected, exploded on the top flat of the mansions in which she lived but, as usual, Grandmother carried on as normal, as if nothing had happened, though at the time we thought it was a small german bomb.

Incendiary bombs did not always set a building on fire, although they usually did. Sometimes they smashed through the roof and burnt their way through a couple of floors before going out.

Another strange or rather peculiar thing were the contents of the anti-aircraft shells. Normally they contained high explosives which showered the area with shrapnel when they exploded. Sometimes they packed them with coils of wire - the idea being that this wire would wrap itself round every propeller causing the plane to crash. I do not think this proved very successfulbut it was a boon to shrapnel collectors like myself; to find a short coil of this wire was considered a find indeed.

Some people went down the tube to get away from the bombing. We never did because our mum said that for one thing it stank! which it did. Looking back there were other dangers. If a bomb hit a water main in the road above, you stood a good chance of drowning. Another threat was panic. in order to escape from the tube from imagined or real danger, a crowd could panic resulting in people being crushed to death. This happened on at least one occasion.

Not all bombs whistled and hissed. A type of bomb, feared by the Londoners at the time, was the parachute mine. How true the description of this weapon was, i don't know, but it was thought to be a mine which drifted down the end of a parachute and consequently exploded without warning. It's effect was devasting - whole streets were wiped out when it exploded.

My first introduction to the bombing was one late afternoon. Several other boys and i, were playing football in the park a few miles from the surrey dock. We were distracted from the game by a series of explosions from the north east. At the same time, the sky in that direction took an angry red colour. We assumed it was just a big fire which was causing things, caught up in the fire, to explode. Afterwards, we found out that it was German's bombing warehouses in the docks. It seems ironic but we just carried on with our game!

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