大象传媒

The incessant wail of the sirens awakened me from a deep sleep, pulling the covers over my head to try and drown out the ominous tones which pierced the night sky I tried to go back to sleep only to be angrily shook by my Mother shouting that "the bloody Germans were back again" and we had to go outside into the Anderson shelter which had been erected in our front garden.
At first it had been an adventure,the excitement of being able to get out of bed in the middle of the night,sitting in the shelter with my Mother,Grandmother and two sisters and a brother listening to the German bombers flying low overhead, big, black foreboding machines with bomb doors open ready to drop their terrible load.
The laughs we had as on the second night the sirens went was the sight of old Mr. Wood from next door,standing in the middle of the road dressed only in his long-johns waving his fists and shouting obscenities at the German aircrews who flew on blissfully unaware that three hudred feet below a lone Englishman was casting doubts as to whether or not they all had fathers.
But tonight was the ninth night in succession we had been dragged from our beds and into the shelter and the novelty of it all was beginning to wear off. The air raids never lasted long enough so that we would have to miss school the next day and you soon stopped talking about planes that rumbled low over your street but very seldom saw.
We did have a couple of days of great fun when the local Home Guard used the school field at the back of our house to practice throwing hand-grenades. In the field were six large brick shelters at regular intervals for us kids to use if ever there was an air raid during school hours. We never ever used them (well not for the purpose for which they were built0, so it was good fun watching these pretend soldiers hurling dummy grenades over the shelters and then throwing themselves to the ground, making beieve that they were for real and were going to explode.
The second day we had even more fun, we hid behind the shelters and when the grenades came over we grabbed them and hid them in the second shelter down and then some distance away we would lie down in the long grass and giggle inanely as the would be soldiers looked high and low for them, but alas after a couple of hours of great fun the sergeant in charge spooted what we were doing and reported us to the head-mistress. after being told that our tricks could be classed as treason for which we could be shot we were made to march shamefacedly into the presence of a rather large sergeant and made to apologise.
Up until one particular night, we had no fears at all of war-time, but earlier in the evening my Mother had tuned into the wireless to listen to the traitor Lord Haw Haw(William Joyce) who used to broadcast to England telling us we were fighting a losing
war and to also inform us exactly where the German bombers were going to drop their bombs.He said that bombers targets for that night were the Army barracks which were about two miles away, the railway sidings at the bottom of our street, the gas-works about a mile behind us and the Royal Naval
vessel the King George V which was in the Tyne. Sitting in the shelter that night was the longest was the longest of my very short life. I can still hear the high pitched whistling as the bombs came down and the enormous explosions as they hit even the ground beneath the shelter shook, I was terrified and hope we never have to experience anything like that again. That was the closest I ever came to war and believe me it was too close. We learned the next morning that the bombers had missed all their intended targets but a house a hundre yards down the street had received a direct hit, luckily the families were in their shelters and there was just a few minor injuries, every-one was glad but that night it was too close to home. I hate wars, don't you?

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