大象传媒

I was only a toddler, war was a terrifying introduction to life. I think that is why I remember things I saw when I was very young, not just things I heard the adults talk about. Mother and I visited a friend whose bungalow was badly damaged by a bomb, all doors & windows had gone, but the main structure was still standing. The floor was strewn with debris, mostly broken glass. As we walked through you could see into the bathroom where a neighbour was sitting in the bath with someone (probably another neighbour, not a nurse) bathing her back, which was the most horrific sight, being covered in hundreds of small, deep cuts. She must have been in terrible pain but uttered no sound. Her bungalow. opposite, had been totally destroyed, she was lucky to survive. I can never forget that sight, it is as vivid today as it was 60 years ago.
Years later my Father told how he was walking down the hill to the bus stop that morning as the bombs started to fall, in the blast he was knocked to the ground and was unconscious for a while. He remembered as he came round, seeing a lady come out through the roof of her bungalow, the roof now being at ground level. It was probably the same lady that I saw being attended to later in the morning. My Father picked himself up, continued his walk to the station (as I think by then the buses could not get through), travelled up to Marylebone where he worked as a maintenance engineer for British Railways. His job meant he was in a 'reserved occupation' and was not called up to the Services but it wasn't any easier or less dangerous. On one occasion he had to sleep in his office and in the morning an unexploded bomb was discovered outside the window!

My Father paid for Mother and I to be 'evacuated' to Rutland but we both hated it, Mother kept coming back home, only to be sent away again. In Rutland I remember most of the community gathering one Sunday in a field to watch the American soldiers practising parachute jumping in preparation for what was to be D Day, I have often wondered since how many of those brave young lads that we saw never made it home to the States. The recent TV series 'Band of Brothers' brought it all back to me.

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