大象传媒

In November 1940 I was a schoolboy, 16 years old and living with my aunt, a retired schoolteacherin a semi-detached house at 17 Elm Grove in Rayners Lane, a suburb of Harrow. From September 1940 to May 1941 we suffered the blitz attack by German aircraft virtually every night. The usual practice was for the German aircraft to fly continuously round London and its suburbs until there was just enough fuel left to get them back to their base in France. This way the drone of their engines caused maximum disruption to us by creating anxiety and disturbing sleep. We moved our beds downstairs but otherwise tried to live a normal life.

On 16th November 1940, the night immediately following the famous Coventry raid, I was blown out of bed by a German bomb and ended up on the floor, though I was unhurt. I heard the scream of the falling bomb coming through the air followed by a great crash and my first impression was the house was falling in on me. I found I was unhurt and my next feeling was one of enormous relief. I thought " I've survived a bomb almost on top of me-they'll never get closer than that" (and I was right, they never did). My aunt in the next room was also unhurt but the house was in tremendous disorder. All the tiles had been blown off the roof and heavy rain was pouring in. The leaded light windows in the front of our house had all been sucked out by the blast. The air was full of soot which had been blown down the chimneys and which settled over everything. In the larder all the jars containing jams and liquids had been blown off the shelves and had smashed together in a great mess of broken glass overlaid by soot. In the morning Air Raid Wardens and other helpers arranged for tarpaulins to be placed over our roof , which at least kept the water out and the windows were also boarded up.

When daylight came a group of passers-by lined up to watch us and I felt a great spasm of hatred for them. What were they doing, simply staring at our misfortune? The pair of houses next door to us had been demolished by the bomb which had fallen in their front gardens, sucking the fronts of those houses into the crater. Mercifully no-one had been killed; the only casualty was a hedgehog lying dead on the edge of the bomb crater. We left for a few days to stay with relatives in a country area, the first opportunity I had to wash my hair after the bomb. A thick layer of soot remained on the surface of the wash water. We soon returned home. We spent a cold and uncomfortable winter , although our roof was repaired after a week or two and our windows were also replaced.

The pattern of continuous nightly air attacks continued till May 1941 when the main German attack was diverted to the Russian front. We still suffered occasional night raids; in 1943 a bomb was dropped in the next road, Vicarage Way, about 100 yards away, which tragically did kill a 12 year old boy, Anthony Peck, in his bed. One theory as to why a number of bombs fell in a small area of this London suburb was that it was close by the junction of the Piccadilly and Metropolitan lines at Rayners Lane station and the sky was lit up by frequent flashes caused by the trains crossing the points, which attracted attention as a possible target.

I left school before the end of 1940 to work as a laboratory assistant at Colne Valley Water Co at Bushey near Watford at a salary of 拢65 per annum. By the time I paid National Insurance, fares and lunches very little was left. But I was assured I was fortunate because "there is a pension at the end of it". My work frequenly involved checking the purity of water in houses where the mains had been broken by a bomb and then been reconnected. I began study for a science degree part-time at Birkbeck College. Normally this would have been evening study but because of the blitz classes were held on Saturdays and Sundays, so one worked a seven-day week. I was not called up for military service because I suffered very bad asthma and was given a low medical grade. So I worked at Glaxo Labs at Greenford on penicillin and also served as a part-time member of the Auxiliary Fire Service. Fortunately there were no major fires at Glaxo in my time; the large volumes of organic solvent were a major hazard but in 1944 a V1 "buzz-bomb" fell in the milk powder packing plant on a Sunday. Had it fallen during the week loss of life would have been heavy, but on a Sunday the place was empty. That was my last encounter with a wartime bomb.

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