大象传媒

Between me sleeping through separate blitzes (rural Notts and gritty Glasgow) and being excited out of bed by a maverick buzz bomb in very central East Anglia, Reichsmarshall Hermann Georing nearly got me - in Ealing.

In May 1941, Kesselring moved his 22nd Air Fleet to Poznan and within a month Hitler's Operation Barbarossa was launched against the Soviet Union. So London bombing had ceased. My mother, conscripted into munitions at Handley Page, fetched me from Nottingham to live with her in Mount Park Road, W5; but although she assumed the capital safer than as three years hitherto, like millions of other Londoners, she'd reckoned without Hitler's Operation Rumpelkammer - the assault by the V1 vengeance weapon (Vergeltungswaffe), known by us as doodlebugs or buzz bombs.

The major change with the August 1944 attacks on London from those following the Battle of Britain, was that buzz bombs were not restricted to night and their "targets" were even more random than those of the inaccurate Dorniers and Heinkels of 1941. They roared up Buzz Bomb Alley, between Dover and Croydon, falling where their haphazard fuelling was exhausted. The pattern was even less predictable with fast RAF Typhoons turning them in flight, when one might even shatter a Norfolk dawn. So air raid sirens and shelters lost their reason. It was a constant 24-hour peril pointless to sit out in shelters - and tube stations were not equipped for being day-time havens as for the nights of 1941. Also by 1944, the underground was no longer used for shelter. So, under the V1, Londoners just took it, without changing step - although far worse was to follow with the next edition of Vergeltungswaffe, the less cuddly V2 of Wernher von Braun, later to put US astronauts on the moon. It's retrospective comfort to know I helped NASA, as I hopped from foot to foot.

I went so rarely to the pictures then, because I had to be taken; and can list the films I saw before VE Day - in order: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; The Mark of Zorro; Captains Courageous, and Robin Hood. Mr Zorro saved my life. One afternoon my mother took me to the cinema on Ealing Broadway to see it. While we watched Zorro deface furniture and fittings with his zedding sword, there was a muffled crump and our seats shuddered. Before panic set in, the lights went up and an ARP warden announced a flying bomb had dropped locally, disrupting bus services and filling the streets with fire engines and stuff. We were to stay where we were until the damaged area was safe, and enjoy the film. So we did, but where had it dropped? I'd lost interest in swashbuckling; but my mother, an emergency ambulance driver who could be needed, dutifully obeyed the warden.

When we got home, it wasn't. We got nowhere near, because Mount Park Road was closed by a buzz bomb hitting our flat spot on - killing at least four, including her best friend with whom she had shared. Apart from dead cows and rabbits after the Belvoir bombing and a very dim memory of the morning after a disturbed sleep in Glasgow, it was my only wartime sight of violent death. Despite her grief, my mother's instantaneous reaction was a survivor's instinct. Equipped with the apt proforma, she had me rehearsed and dirtied for a tearful spiel at the Food Office - for new ration books. The current ones had been ostensibly charred to ashes by Vergeltungswaffery. Actually they were safe in mother's handbag, but that's what mothers are for.

I should have taken to the stage. We must have been a good team, as replacement proved so easy, and an opportunist replay came when a friendly buzz bomb took out an Acton grocer's shop that often (but not always) held our ration books. For that performance my mother shipped me in from where I was living in Harrow, to be near a soppy private day school she'd found. They wore uniforms and caps, and sneered at my Nottingham accent - but as bad luck would have it, like Betjeman's Slough, doodlebugs avoided it. But the snooty rig did the trick, and once more we were provisionally victualled. I then went to an even worse small boarding school, near Diss, on the Norfolk/Suffolk border - under the compensating drones of thousands of Merlins and Wright-Cyclones out to punish the Rhineland for its savage threats to my ration book.

While I was there, my mother got her comeuppance. Lightning might not strike the same place twice, but buzz bombs were no force of nature. She eventually found a flat in Old Oak Road, Acton (number 66, I think) - and came back from making Halifaxes one evening to find it as open to the public as had been Mount Park Road. Another direct hit. She'd be a good candidate for the National Lottery. Little wonder I had to keep dodging and weaving. Such was total war. But this time I wasn't there to be a child prodigy thespian weeping for new ration books. Sorry, Mum.

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