大象传媒

This is really no more than a ragbag of recollections, beginning with the outbreak of war, which I can remember only for the noise which our local (West Watford) siren made - it was said to be powered by steam and went off in a series of scarcely controlled "whoops", quite unlike the steady rising and falling sound of all the other sirens.
School meant sometimes being sent home for a forgotten gas mask, and occasionally sheltering in the cloak room, which I suppose was reckoned to be slightly less likely to fall in on us,
The blackout was now and then absolutely pitch dark. I remember going back home one evening after visiting only a few houses away,and having to feel all the fences and gates until one turned up which felt like home-fortunately it was home.
During the worst period of air raids my mother and I slept in the Anderson shelter in the garden (Dad was a gunner with the 51st Highland Division - they called him McCraddock
as a joke, he being almost a Londoner). To return to the shelter, as it were; we were disturbed one night to hear the typical off-beat noise of a German bomber becoming louder and louder. It took us several anxious minutes before we realised it was our cat, who had invited in a friend and was purring asthmatically on the top bunk.
We lived at No.13 - there were incendiaries through the roofs of houses on either side of us, but we came through untouched, not even a bit of shrapnel in the garden, much to my disgust. Incendiary tail fins were often turned into flower vases.
Much later in the war I saw a V1 pass close over our street. The way my mother told it, I bolted straight through the house and hurled myself into the shelter, coming out after the explosion sounded, some distance away, and then getting a fit of the giggles, saying "You should have seen two old ladies -they were going down the road like Derby winners."
I also saw a V1 explode some distance away while I was collecting locomotive numbers on the bridge at Watford Heath. It turned out that it fell on the orchard of a farm that I knew - the only damage being some tiles off a barn and a few trees blown down; most of which continued to bear fruit!

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