大象传媒

When the war began I was due to take the "Scholarship" and became entitled to attend a grammar school, as all my sister had done.This was in Edmonton, North London. At the same time the evacuation of all schoolchildren from London was to take place. My mother refused to allow me to be evacuated. As the youngest of six children she thought it would be far better, if we were to be bombed, for us to die together rather than for one small boy to be left on his own. I cannot think that she was wrong.

As the schools left London with the evacuees I did not go to a grammar school: in fact for much of a year I did not go to school at all. There were very few other children to play with and I roamed around the parks and spent a lot of time in the public libraries, where there did not seem to be any restriction on what books I borrowed. After about ten months, children began to drift back into Edmonton and schools began again, in a small way. I remember one starting up in someone`s house, and then I was enrolled in a Central School which seemed to have a new sort of curriculum, in that instead of Latin and classical subjects there were commercial subjects like book-keeping, typing and shorthand for those who were destined for office work, and machine drawing and suchlike for the factory fodder. I chose the office subjects.

About the same time as this drift back to Edmonton, the Blitz started and the Alcazar cinema in Edmonton High Street, where I saw my first film, was completely destroyed. A lot of bombs fell on Edmonton and even more on the Tottenham indistrial estate, where my father worked as a toolmaker. Most nights we slept in the Anderson shelter in our garden, which I hated. It was damp, over-crowded and smelly: the only heat was from an oilstove which was another discomfort. After a while, like most people, we stayed indoors and only went out to the shelter if there was a particularly heavy raid.

I do not recall being frightened during the Blitz. I was probably too young and most children take it for granted that they are going to live for ever. But one night we could hear German `planes overhead among all the anti-aircraft guns. German `planes had a special engine note which we had all learned to recognize and their bombs hd a gadget attached to one of the fins that sounded a high-pitched whistle as it came down, always, it seemed, as if it was making straight for you. Psychological warfare. As I say, on this particular night it did strike me that this was not some kind of a game. I had the conscious thought that men were flying above who were trying to kill me.

During the day I cannot remember anyone going into their shelters. What I do remember are the dogfights: some time in 1940, I think September, one gorgeous sunny afternoon I was out in the street with another boy. There were no cars in streets then and we were standing in the middle of the road watching Spitfires attacking German `planes. It was like a film because `planes did not flash by as they do now: guns were banging away in the local parks and spent machine bullets were bouncing off pavements and smashing into roof tiles. It never occurred to us that we should not be there and then a window went up and Jimmy`s mother stuck her head out and shouted to us, "Jimmy, you little bugger, come in here. Do you want to get run over?"

Most of the time we just lived our lves. It must have been my mother who had the worst of it, juggling the food, the rationing and all the rest of it. My brother had joined the army at the start of the war and at the time was guarding Hornchurch aerodrome, my four sisters were at work and wrote, or did not, to their various boyfriends. I cannot remember the day-to-day events. What you do remember are snapshots.

One was a stick of bombs being dropped across our street. A German bomber was caught in searchlights and let go his bomb load to escape, the whole line of them went acrosss four streets and Pymms Park and two of the houses in Warwick Road. In the morning that end of the street was blocked off by heavy demolition men, and I had to go round the other way. When I got to school the first thing was the ritual of marking the register and my teacher read out the names. When she got to the boy who lived in the bombed house I can still hear my voice piping up, "He won`t be coming to school any more, Miss. He was killed last night." I can remember her face as she looked at me, and said, very thoughtfully, "Are you sure?"

"Oh, yes Miss, the men digging his house out told me that everyone in it was dead."

When I still roamed around the streets during the day and there was an air-raid warning, quite often women came out of their houses and took me in to the shelters. They seemed to be old to me, but looking back they were not much more than thirty-odd. I suppose that they missed their own children. Occasionally there would be a milkman down there as well, who would have tied his horse to a tree or railing.

Another memory I have is of my father who worked in a factory on the Tottenham industrial estate. He was a toolmaker and like all the men of non-military age became one of the street`s fire-watchers. As the raids became more and more frequent there were a lot of fires to watch. Now, when my father came home from work, he had a little ritual. He changed from his work clothes and washed very thoroughly, getting rid of the dirt and oil of his day, so that when he sat down to his evening meal he was a new man, so to speak.

On this evening, just before he sat down to eat, there was a knock on the door and the chief fire-watcher, Mr. Lagdon, had called for "Mac" as my father was known, to take part in a fire practice that Mr Lagdon had arranged. Mr.Lagdon seems to have been a self-appointed chief and I don`t think my father thought much of him. I once heard him refer to Mr.Lagdon as "all teeth and trousers".

I was intrigued by this and when I went out to watch I was astounded to see my dour father lying full length in the gutter, holding up a hose-pipe towards a ball of newspaper marked "fire-bomb", while another idiot pumped a stirrup-pump up and down in an empty bucket. This went on until my father became aware that he was lying in a dollop of horse manure. He got up and said a few words of which one was "Lagdon". He went back home and slammed the front door so hard that the whole frame rattled. I ran across the road and knocked, the door was opened by my mother and before I could get in she held her hand up and said "Don`t you dare say a word." I didn`t.

Further along Warwick Road lived Mrs. Lemon whose son Johnny was a contemporary of my brother, they went to the same school and played football for the same team. My brother joined the army and Johnny Lemon went into the Royal Navy.

Sometime in 1942 I heard my mother talking about Mrs. Lemon, who had woken up in the middle of the night because she could hear Johnny called for her. She told several women and she got in touch with the Red because the Navy had nothing to say to her. The Red Cross could not help her either. It was months before she got a telegram to tell her that Johnny was missing in action and must be presumed dead. And, it was a lot longer after than, a year or more, before she learned that his ship had been sunk by the Japanese. When more facts came to light, it became clear that the ship he was on was attacked at the same moment as his mother had been woken up to hear him screaming. There were other stories like that during the war.

In 1944 the flying bombs started and after them the V2s. My closest encounter with them was whilst I was cycling to school after lunch down Wilbury Way. On one side was the high blank wall of the North Middlesex Hospital and on the other were allotments bordered by a wire fence. I recall nothing of any explosion but I came to with my head in the middle of some cabbages, and when I staggered back on my feet I found that I was in the allotments with no memory of how I got there. My bicycle was out in the road and when I got back, with some difficulty, over the fence, I saw that the handlebars and front of the frame were heavily scraped. It turned out that a V2 had come down in the grounds of Tottenham Grammar School, and that the blast had travelled down the roads that were roughly in line all the way to Wilbury Way, Edmonton.

Thinking about it now, the odd thing is that when I got to school I did not tell anyone of what had happened. I can`t think why - did I think that no one wold believe me - was I suffering from shock? But I remember being puzzled as to how I ended up in the cabbage patch instead of being slammed into the fence, or sent the other way into the brick wall of the hospital. I can only think that the blast lifted me some four feet in the air and then sent me another ten or fifteen feet sideways. All very odd. A mystery.

On the 6th June 1944 the invation of France took place and everyone knew all about it by the time that I got to school. The wireless broadcasts were on all day. Apart from cheering on our troops the main relief was that the rocket sites would be captured and the V2 attacks would stop.

At Easter 1945 I left school with the School Certificte and through some placement system I got a job as a junior clerk in barristers` chambers in the Temple, off Fleet Street, while almost all of my schoolmates went to work on the line at Fords.

A month or so after I began work, Hitler was dead and the war was over and the whole of London erupted in a kind of madness. I remember a couple of soldiers and some girls jumping about on the roof of an old taxi in Fleet Street, so that the roof caved in. I joined the crowds and got swept along the Strand and into Leicester Square. Someone was throwing sweets out of a window of South Africa House, and a couple of drunk RAF pilots poured whisky out of the top window of a hotel/restaurant while some old boy tried to catch some of it in his hat. I somehow got to Whitehall and in the crowd outside (I think) the Ministry of Health there was a shout as men came out on the balcony: one was said to be Churchill. He was far above me but it did look like him. I can`t remember how I got home that night.

A month or so later and I went up Middle Temple Lane inhto another great crowd where there was an open carriage with horses stationed at Temple Bar, abnd I saw Eisenhower and Tedder get in it to be trotted off to the Mansion House where they were given the Freedom of the City of London.

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