大象传媒

I was five years old when the war started, in 1939. I lived in Plaistow in the East End of London, with my mum and dad. Four sisters and a brother, and my granddad.

Like many other young children I was evacuated out of London, with two of my sisters, one was 13 and the other was 15 years old. We went to Minety in Wiltshire. This was a small village near Malmesbury and Sherston. We each had our gas masks, a small case each, and a brown paper labels around our necks. In our cases were just a change of underwear and a few other small items of clothing. We did not have very much in those days.

We were packed off from the school premises, not long after war was declared. We were transported by buses to Reading. At Reading we were taken to a Church Hall. At the hall we were given brown paper bags, and we had to walk around the long rows of tables where we were given different bits of food rations, like sugar, margarine, bread, fruit and so on which was a complete week of food rations, this was to be given to the people who were to look after us.

Then we were then transported by buses to Sherston in Wiltshire, where a billeting officer allocated us to various families. This lady wore a trilby hat and seemed very frightening to us very young children.

My two older sisters were allocated a different family to me, and they went one way and I went to another one. Being only five years old, I was too young to be much help on a local farm, as would an older boy. So I was sent to a family who looked after me well, though to my young five year old perspective seemed very old, but they were probably only in their thirties!!

We lived in a railway carriage, on a railway siding near the station in Minety. At the time this seemed like an adventure because people in the East End where I grew up did not go on holiday they could not afford it. Some people went on hop or fruit picking 鈥渨orking holidays鈥� in Kent, staying wooden sheds for fruit picking or sheds made of corrugated sheets of iron, for hop picking. Living in Minety I was able to explore the countryside, enjoying the wildlife, birds and trees. Every day I went to the farm on the way to school to collect the milk for the teacher. I saw the cows and horses which I would never normally see in London, although the milkman used to deliver the milk there by horse and cart, and he would fill up your milk churn with a ladle.

Most memorable for me was my sixth birthday, when the farmer gave me a toy tractor, which had rubber treads on it, I had never had a toy before, we were not deprived children, just poor, but children in London did not have toys, there was not the money for those sorts of things in those days. I have always remembered this red tractor. I was overjoyed with this toy, it was clockwork, and I was amazed at how it went along on its own.

I remained at this home for one year, and then one day my sister and her friend who was in the ATS came and collected me. I did not want to leave my new home, but I had to do what I was told. This was around September 1940 when the Blitz really started. I suffered the Blitz conditions, but as a small child I did not appreciate the full danger of it all. Spending most nights in the Anderson Shelter. The worse memory I have of nearly being injured during the war, was when I went out of the house during the day, the air raid sirens were not going, and I looked up to see just twenty feet above me just above the roof top of our house was a Doodlebug, or Flying bomb, a V2. It carried on to the houses behind ours, which were connected to ours 鈥渂ack to back鈥�. Before it exploded its wing clipped my aunt鈥檚 house, and cut the wall in two, and then it exploded and killed my cousin. He was blown across the road, to a block of flats opposite, and his body was rapped around a chimney pot. But he lived to tell the tale; he was 16 years old at the time.

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