大象传媒

I lived in London throughout most of the Blitz. Even today, nearly six decades later, just hearing the long wail of warning sirens on old newsreels and movies, always gives me that same cold knot of fear in the pit of my stomach which I invariably felt all those years ago. It reminds me too of the huge wave of relief we all felt when that long, beautiful, clear, unbroken siren sounded, signaling the end of an air raid. I was too young to fight in the war and Germany's decision to attempt to subdue our civilian population with a murderous blitzkrieg was traumatic for everyone, but particularly so for the older children, as we saw people we had known all our young lives, killed, burned, maimed and buried, in the rubble of nearby houses.
I remember one morning, after a V1 struck, helping and crying, half hysterical, to pull at the rubble of a house, flattened, just round the corner in Avenue Road and uncovering the head of a man split right across with a zig-zag crack from front to back and I stood back laughing frantically, till someone literally slapped me, just like they do in the old films, then gently led me away for a cup of tea. I could hardly drink it. My whole body was shaking. Daily we watched those V1鈥檚 the 'doodlebugs' rattling across the skies and held our breath in absolute terror as the quite unmistakable mechanical roar quite suddenly stopped, and if, instead of dropping straightaway, it sped silently on, as they sometimes did, we breathed again, since it meant that mercifully for us, it would fall on somebody else.
One night, we were asleep in our tiny Anderson shelter during a raid and a stick of eight bombs fell right across our estate. Only one of the eight failed to explode. It was the one that fell just a few feet from us, the massive impact of it tilting our heavily covered Anderson shelter right over on it's side. Had it gone off I guess we would all have been vaporized. We lay there trembling, terrified, too afraid to move, until a little later, Dad's distracted voice called to us from the entrance of the shelter as he frantically pulled the earth away. He had run all the way home from Southgate having been told "Hood Avenue鈥檚 copped it". When he saw that all of us were alright, he broke down and sobbed. We had never seen him cry before and were all quiet and subdued, far more from just seeing Dad鈥檚 tears, than from any fear of that massive unexploded bomb, lurking a mere few feet away.
For a long time thereafter we slept on the platforms at Southgate underground station and would settle down to sleep as the last trains came in. Passengers would alight, gingerly skirting our bedding. My recollection is that we, and they, were always cheerful, always good natured, always friendly. Despite the underlying fear that I suspect was within everyone, of the next night鈥檚 raid, life for us kids at least, was still a great adventure.
In 1943 the Germans began to fire on London their V2 rockets which, with no warning whatsoever suddenly flattened many parts of London and the authorities decided that all remaining children under 14 should be evacuated. At 13 I was sent to Smallburgh, a little village in Norfolk about ten miles west of Norwich. I spent what I forever after recalled, as the happiest time of my life there. For the first four months I had no schooling whatsoever, I just played at working on a farm, helping with the two dozen huge, glossy, Suffolk Punch draught horses.

I became very friendly with the farmer's son Gavin, just a year older than me, who was still, in those days, called by everyone in the village, "the young maister". It was a completely different world to anything I had ever known or experienced. I came from an environment where, meat, sugar, bread, butter, milk, was all very strictly rationed, (the butter ration for example was two ounces per person, per week) and being able to take a week's ration of butter on to your plate at any one mealtime, as much home-made bread as you could eat, an abundance of meat, roast beef, lamb, pork, rabbit pie, raspberries, strawberries, cream, was a total revelation.

From a council house with tiny rooms, I was suddenly experiencing undreamed of luxury, living with a wealthy family in a house with huge high ceilings, massive bathrooms, a thousand acres, all the space in the world. I was taught to harness and saddle up and was soon taking a horse and trap to nearby Stalham market. I was also taught to ride and given a small but very beautiful half Arab pony, called Peggy, competed in Gymkhanas, taught to shoot and was even provided with a small double barreled .410 shotgun; what a whole new, joyous world for a cockney kid from a North London council estate. I even, for the first time, fell in love in a hay loft, but that鈥檚 another story for another time; what a total joy it all was. But I did miss me Mum!

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