大象传媒

Interview with Eric Murket by Henriette Wood Grossenbacher.
Eric is a longstanding friend of my husband, a mate from work at the London Electricity board. He spent the wartime as a primary school boy in London. He kindly gave permission to add his stories to the Peoples鈥� War website. The interview took place in late September 2005 at his house in Hunstanton, Norfolk
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We used to collect shrapnel in the morning if we went to school that day, we would look for shrapnel, that would have been fired at bombers over night It was a joy to collect shrapnel, sometimes it was still hot, but we always picked it up and collected it. It was just fun for children, war was, they didn鈥檛 see no danger, nothing, just adventures. No grown ups seemed to bother that we just ran wild. There wasn鈥檛 much school neither, very little schooling. The rules were, if an air raid warning went, the siren went we were to stay indoors, which we did- or play.
The school that was bombed was not the school I went to, it was the school I lived by. We moved into the house on the night it was bombed and all I can remember as a child was lots of flames. I can remember it burning but that is about all I can remember. That bombed school became the playground for children. We had wonderful games in there. I can recall, that some of the playgrounds were flooded by the rain, the drains were obviously blocked and we used to have boats or ships we called them. In doing so we used to man these ships with insects such as caterpillars and a firework, and the firework used to blow off and explode and the poor caterpillars got blown up and the kids would shout out:鈥� man overboard鈥�. The boats were not very big, just bits of wood that were shaped like a boat.

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