大象传媒

I was 12 on a summer evening in 1940 and playing in a barn on a friend's farm a quarter of a mile from home in the village of Newlyn. We heard a low-flying aircraft and since this was still a novelty we dashed outside to look. And there it was, a Heinkel bomber, German markings clearly visible, flying in from the north towards Penzance.
"It's a German", cried my friend, and I took off for home down the long farm path, running parallel to the aircraft with my eyes firmly fixed on it.
To my horror I saw the bomb doors open and four black objects fall out.
I have never been athletic and always came last in any races but this time I must have been the first 4 minute miler for I swear I was nearly home before the explosions came.
Luckily the bombs landed in the sea off Penzance Promenada and hurt nobody.
We were officially 'a safe area' but had a number of short sharp air raids during the next five years.
To this day I remember vividly the sight of that
bomber and thinking as I ran, "He's after ME!"

After the Dunkirk evacuations I once sat alone on the school field eating lunchtime sandwiches and feeling very frightened that the Germans were now only a few miles away across the Channel. It was a sobering thought!

Before D-Day in 1944, when I was 16, Penzance and district was full of American soldiers, a great novelty, for the only Americans we had ever heard of were in Hollywood films. We discovered chewing gum, Hershey candy bars and learned how to play softball. Strange craft appeared in the bay, among them rocket barges and things which looked like upturned tables. We later realised these were parts of the Mulberry Harbour used on the Normandy beaches. Cycling to Penzance Grammar School one June morning hundreds of Americans in full battle gear were standing on the Promendade and in the tennis courts by the Pavilion Theatre, their vehicles drawn up in the road. They were in good spirits and one, standing on a balcony was giving an imitation of Mussolini. The soldiers responded with Fascit salutes and cries of Viva il Duce! At lunchtime they were gone, the area was deserted and we never saw them again. How many survived I wonder?
On the morning of the D Day landings our school field was littered with strips of aluminum foil which fluttered down in ghostly silence from above. What they were we knew not. Only afterwards did we discover that they were 'window' dropped to confuse German radar.
Such was the secrecy surrounding the Normandy invasion that we had absolutley no idea of what was going on practically under our noses.

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