大象传媒

In April 1941 three houses just a few yards behind our house in Wooler Avenue received a direct hit and the families were all killed. Our neighbours houses were peppered with bullet holes (some of the chipped tiles and bricks are still visible today). The blast blew the roof off our house and the walls split apart, but before the walls could collapse, the roof fell back down. We were in the air-raid shelter, which was dug deep into what had been the lawn in the back garden. And we were singing. At the tops of our voices. My Mum kept urging us to sing 'louder' and although we didn't know it then, it was to drown out the noise of the guns and the bullets. I can't remember being at all frightened. If the land mine and bombs had fallen on us, instead of those other poor people, we would have died singing.

I remember the next morning well. I was just two years old but such momentous events are etched on the brain, however young. It was a freezing cold morning, with a thick frost. Every window in our house had been blown out, and the blackout curtains were hanging in rags (my Mum said afterwards she was really mad, because she had just cleaned the windows the day before). Every door in the house had been blown off its hinges. And there was soot EVERYWHERE, every house in the road having had their chimneys swept by the Luftwaffe and deposited inside the house. Neighbours two doors away had decided not to go into the shelter and stayed up playing cards; they received the full force of the soot. Next morning, when they appeared outside looking like chimney-sweeps, everybody turned out to see them and they all had a good laugh.

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