大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Danielle Edwards from The Folkestone School for Girls and has been added to the website on behalf of Kathleen Mckenzie with her permission and she fully understands the
site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was 10 when the war started and 16 when it ended, and I lived next to an army barracks in London, Richmond Park.
I have many memories of the War, here are just a few.

I remember when my dad returning to the army, after he had been on leave -- going to the station with my mother to see him off. I remember standing at the platform with my dad looking out of the train window saying goodbye and my mother crying and then the silent journey home again.

I remember during one air raid a bomb fell about two houses away from us. We were hiding in an alcove. The ceilings collapsed and we were covered in white and were deafened. There was dead silence after that, with everyone pushing things aside and moving debris. Fortunately we all survived and sometime after the ARP men (Air Raid Precautionary) came to put tarpaulin in replace of the roof. But this was normal, 1 in 3 houses were shattered or down.

Kittens
When my grandmother had an unexploded bomb (UXB) in her front garden she came to stay with us. But she had a litter of kittens and their mother was left in her house. I remember, along with my brother and auntie, sneaking into her house past the ARP men to collect the kittens. We couldn鈥檛 bear the thought of them being trapped in the house alone. When we got into the house the silence felt so loud that it made your eyes go funny! The bomb was merely yards from us, I was terrified! We grabbed the kittens in a basket and got out of the house as fast as we could. We were only there for a few minutes but it felt like hours.
When my mother asked how we got them we said that the ARP retrieved them for us. I did not tell her the truth until just before she died, years later.

The Futility of War
It was a daytime air raid, aiming for the barracks. There was a dogfight in the sky and we (my brother and I) saw a plane with a black cross burst into flames and we knew it was about to fall. It crashed to the ground at Putney Heath a short distance from our home. There was a lot of smoke. Once the air raid was over my brother and I, as usual, ran out to search for souvenirs. There were a lot of other children doing the same. The plane was in pieces and smoke was still erupting out of it. The young German pilot was hanging by his harness from a tree badly burnt and dead. We stood and looked for a moment then one child tried to take a part of his uniform to keep. All of the children then fought to tear a part of his uniform, which was badly burnt and came away easily.

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