大象传媒

I was born in 1939 just before the onset of war and my memories will be from a childs perspective and I would love to know actual dates.
I woke to find myself alone in an Anderson Shelter with the door banging when I emerged I found myself in a huge expanse of broken glass( it was probably just the are of two small east end yards)
The back door and windows were hanging broken and banging. It turned out everyone had gone to find out what damage was done to the house leaving me asleep in the shelter. I remember seeing people scrabbling among the rubble of houses and stretchers covered with red blankets.
The bomb or doodle bug had fallen at the end of the road the junction of Cleaver or Clever Road and Freemason's road E16.I did not understand and it felt unreal, sort of heavy but strange. On another occassion my brother and I were due to be evacuated but my mother claimed she had a premonition and would not take us to the collection point. Had we gone we would have been among the children and parents waiting for transport at Hallsville school when the place was devastated by bombs. My father was a stoker on board ship , having served in the first world war in the navy he sailed with the merchant fleet in the second. He survived the Gibraltar runs and later the dreaded North Atlantic Convoys.When my father returned I did not really know him, I had seen very little of him since birth , but remember as a young child entering my parents room to be confronted by him telling me that all the ornaments were coming to get him and that my brother was climbing on the roof of a neighbouring church roof. He was in the grip of a malaria fever from which he recovered, thank God.He was a tacitern man and I felt what he had experienced he did not want to discuss.
My growing up was mostly post war but I thought it natural to have all these wide open spaces of the bomb sites to play on they sometimes revealed all sorts of bits and pieces of broken crockery, shrapnel etc. It was our adventure playground .

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.