大象传媒

As the war progressed I was sent to live with distant relatives in the heart of Sussex, far away from our Portsmouth home and the bombs.
The childless couple who took me in lived in the gate lodge of a stately home, which they called The Big House. There were two little dogs and brown chickens in the garden, and fields all around.
I went to school in a village nearby, across three fields and up a dark lane beside the churchyard. I carried my gas mask in a little box on a string, which came in quite handy for hitting little boys who pulled my hair on the way home.
On Sundays I made the same journey to sing in the choir at the little church, carrying a penny in my pocket for the collection.
Occasionally there was a knitting bee at the Big House where we all sat in a circle, knitting hats and scarves for soldiers; I was by far the youngest participant and could just manage a very crooked scarf. The proceedings were made jolly with word games and spelling bees.
Sometimes we were awakened at night by the drone of a 'doodle bug', and would watch its light from the window, then hear a distant thud and hope that it wasn't neary anyone's house. As the town siren sounded the long 'all clear', granny would get up from her shelter under the heavy dining room table, muttering about it being a close one that time while she pumped up the Primus for a cup of tea.
Our school was one large room with a sliding partition in the middle, and two smaller rooms - the infants' room and the cloakroom - at the back. It was also used for social events, and the most exciting were the war time Saturday night dances.
At the end of Friday lessons the partition was opened and the bigger boys stacked all the desks and chairs at one end of the room. Although I was too young to attend the dances, I was often taken along to help with the refreshments.
Saturday nights were very noisy, with the blare of dance records over a loudspeaker, or sometimes a live band made up of men too old, or too young, to go to war. The soldiers who came from the nearby camp were mostly American or Canadian, enjoying a little relaxation before being sent to the Front.
My foster parents often asked lonely soldiers home to tea, and I called them all 'Uncle'. They invariably brought biscuits and candy from the camp. Most of them we never saw again, but 'Uncle George' from Canada wrote to us for many years, and when I grew up I visited him and his family in Toronto.
One dayI was playing just inside the gate by our house with my two little dogs when two pretty ladies came walking down the driveway from the Big House. They stopped to pet my dogs, and one of them asked their names. I told her they were Beauty and Jilly. She said how lucky I was to have such nice little playmates, then gave me a lovely smile and walked on with her companion.
My foster mother had been watching from the front window, and when I went back into the house she told me I had been talking to the Queen. Apparently King George VI was busy reviewing the troups, and the Queen and her Lady in Waiting had gone for a walk, right past our house.
Our house was surrounded by fields, and all through the war there were no bombs within miles.
Two or three days after the end of the war, my foster mother was in the kitchen when she heard a plane flying over, then a strange snarling noise, 'like a hundred dogs having a big fight'. She rushed to the front door in time to see a large metal object land in nearest field, as the drone of the plane drifted further away.
It wasn't a bomb, but a spare fuel tank that had fallen off the passing plane; it had missed our house by less than a hundred yards.
Luckily there was no explosion, and no fire, but never again would anything grow in the middle of that field, where all the fuel had soaked into the ground.

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