大象传媒

Early in the war we went to live in Muswell Hill in North London. My father was the
Steward (lay administrator) at the Archway Hospital, now the Whittington. When bombing began in earnest, the hospital hung gas curtains all along the corridor that runs the length of the hospital, half
underground. This made single-sex "dormitories", and the staff slept down there on stretchers. Every evening at about six o'clock my mother and I got a bus from Muswell Hill Broadway down to the hospital and I was put to bed, in my blue siren suit, on a stretcher. I would sleep peacefully through the raids -to a child who has known no other life, everything seems normal. I later discovered my mother spent large amounts of time drinking tea in the nurses' mess; I never saw my father, who was on the hospital roof putting out incendiaries with his stirrup pump. Only once they took me up to the roof in the early hours, to see Jones Bros. the department store in the Holloway Road, blazing from end to end, and fires all across London. In the morning we would get the bus back, never knowing whether our house would still be there.
It survived, but somewhere on the walk from the bus stop there would always be the sound of someone sweeping up broken glass. You wouldn't necessarily know where the bomb had fallen that had blown out your windows - the blast could travel long unpredictable distances.
Later my father moved to Joyce Green Hospital in Dartford, where the London-bound doodlebugs flew over the marshy land between our house
and the hospital a quarter of a mile away. They kept to their assigned path - I never saw one fall.

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