大象传媒

I was almost 6 when the war started. My birthday is 12th September, 1933. I lived in a semi-detached house with my parents and my sister, who is five years older than I, in Welling, Kent. We had only moved to this house in 1937 from Deptford which at the time was one of the docks of London. That area was really devastated during the blitz. I can just remember the "Day War Broke Out", the siren sounded after the announcement on the radio and we went and sat under the stairs. I have not got many memories of the "Phoney War" except for the digging of a large hole in the garden by my father for the Anderson Shelter. My father made it really safe by building a blast wall at the front and covering it thickly with soil and then on top of this a tarpaulin sheet. Inside it had bunks for the four of us and mother made it quite cosy. My father was then aged 34 and worked as a crane driver in a timber yard in Canning Town. He was not called up for the armed services, instead he joined the LDV which later became the Home Guard. More of this later. My mother had not gone out to work since before she was married, now she was working at the Woolwich Arsenal. I think her job was mainly filling shells, so my sister and I had to fend for ourselves for most of the day.
When the Battle of Britain started it was thrilling to watch our fighters go into action. I was of course at that age ignorant of the fact that people were being killed and injured as I watched.
The Blitz was a different story. Air-raids day and night. Sleeping in the shelter on most nights. There was of course the great fun for us children of collecting shrapnel and anything else that fell out of the sky. During this time my mother and our house had a lucky escape, an incendry bomb crashed through the roof of our kitchen while my mother was in it, it bounced off the draining board and out of the open door into the back garden. My mother sustained some small burns to her arm but was otherwise alright. The bomb, after it was put out became a treasured trophy. I wonder what became of it!
These 'pleasures' ended however when my parents decided that we children should be evacuated.
My fathers mother was at this time cook and my aunt Elsie maid to Lady Salmond (her husband was Sir John, Marshall of the Royal Air Force). Lady Salmond was then living in a large house in Wales with her cousin Clover and Lady Eileen Meade. They generously invited all the relatives of my grandmother and aunt, well not all, just the mothers and children to stay in the mews flats on their estate.
Getting to Wales during the blitz was no mean feat! We, my father mother and sister started out on the journey to Wales in, I think, November 1940. It was at the height of the blitz. We must have started out in daylight but it was dark for the rest of the journey. I cannot remember how we got to Woolwich but the only transport we could get into central London was a river 'Bus' from there. As we went up river the docks were all in flames, the worst being on the north side. This is one of my most vivid memories! When we got to central London, Westminter I think, we got a lift on a lorry going to Paddington, which was the station for Wales. I sat in front with my mother and sister alongside the driver. My father had to get into the open back with our cases which was a load of tarry stones for road building. Here is another curious memory, when I got down from the cab of the lorry one of my legs had 'gone to sleep', the first time in my short life that this had happend, and I almost fell. I must have slept for the rest of the journey because I have have no memory of it.
The part of Wales we went to was like another world. Very few houses, green fields, animals and no air-raids! My father returned home almost immediately, my mother stayed for a while and then she also returned, coming back with my father at Christmas which was made wonderful by Lady Salmond's generousity. I think I was only there for about seven months. as soon as the blitz had decreased my sister and were taken back to Welling and our family was reunited once again.
Once back in Welling life settled into something like normality. School for me and my sister, work for my parents and Home Guard duties for my father. He had to keep his weapons at home; an evil looking home made knuckle-duster with a blade to the front, a bayonet of course and a Lewis Machine Gun with many rounds of ammunition, that was kept under the bed!
Life for a child in the war was on the whole enjoyable even without sweets. First there were no Park Keepers so you were able to do things that they would have dissaproved of. Policemen were few, mainly "Specials" who were old (about 40, well that seemed ancient to us lads). The bombed houses became great places to play, when they were cleared of rubble, on an housing estate like ours. There had been a land mine fall early in the war opposite our house which had destroyed about eight semi-detached houses. A place to build huts, a place for our 'war games', some got really rough, with stone throwing, luckily no one was hurt, well not badly. It was not built on until quite a long time after the war.
Years went by and the first V-weapons, the Doodle Bug, started to arrive. It was at this time that the Government decided, that the area I lived in, all children under a certain age would have to be evacuated. I was most reluctant to go. It seemed to my mind that the war had just got interesting again. Anyway off I went with a label on my jacket. We were put on a train at Kings Cross, not knowing where we were going. It took about 5 hours to get to Leeds. I finally ended up in a mining village called Allerton Bywater in Yorkshire. This, like Wales was another culture shock. we were all taken to the village hall and then the villagers came and picked the child that they would like to look after. I had a friend with me from Welling and did not want to be parted but the family who picked me could not take more than one. The family I was billeted with comprised Mother, Father and two daughters. A son was in the Airforce, a sergeant pilot. More of him later! The father was a miner in the local pit and used to work on shifts, so he would be coming home at different times of the day. They were a very good and kind people and I soon settled in, although I was always missing the 'action' back home. I think I was with this family for about a year or maybe less because when my pleas to come home were finally granted the next faze of the V-weapons had begun, the V2 rockets. To a young boy these were a bit boring, just a bang and whoosh and it was all over, for someone!
While writing this other memories come flooding back. These are like snap-shots, and do not relate to any particular event; the time when a piece of shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns just missed my head; one of my friends being killed in an air-raid; diving into the shelter, when the engine of a Doodle Bug cut out nearby and hearing the wind whistling on the wings as it only just cleared our garden by perhaps 50 feet; seeing a German aircraft over-head so low that I could see every detail of it's markings. Other memories too numerous to recall here.
Soon the war was over and in three years I would be at work. As a postscript to this tale, the family that I was billeted with in Yorkshire came to visit us in Welling after the war. With them came the son who had been in the Airforce. He met my sister and on Boxing Day 1947 they were married. He will be 80 this year and my sister is 75. They had two children.

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