大象传媒

My father was an immigrant from Switzerland and came over in 1920. He actually went to Birmingham and met my mother there. Then we moved to Cheltenham when I was 5 years old. I started at Grammar School in September 1939 in Cheltenham. One day the school secretary called me in and I wondered what I had done! She said 鈥渋n view of the present situation, shall we delete your second name from the school register?鈥� So being a clueless child I said 鈥淲hy!鈥� Oh alright she said and as far as I know it stayed on the register.

The Lower School for an air raid took shelter in the main school which was reinforced and sandbagged. So you could not actually run along the corridor you had to keep dodging the sand bags. So the 6th form were allowed to go to the basement of the brewery next door. You can guess what they were up to! Sadly for them there were very few air raids on Cheltenham.

Late in the war after D Day, the summer of 1944. We were getting up in the morning when suddenly my mother said 鈥渢here鈥檚 a Handley Page Hampden flying across the back garden鈥�. This surprised me because my mother knew nothing about aircraft types and the Hampden was an obsolete bomber. So I went into her bedroom and there was a Junkers 88 complete with swastikas and black crosses and firing its machine guns! Anyway this plane flew all around Cheltenham and dropped a very big delayed action bomb on a cinema 鈥� and then went back up into the clouds.

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