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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Radio Northampton Action Desk on behalf of Hazel Hollis and has been added to the site with her permission. Hazel Hollis fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

They are my earliest memories. 1942. A wailing siren. The sway of my mattress as my parents carried me downstairs, half asleep, still on it. When you are not yet 4 years old, such rides were adventures. The mattress just fitted the floor space under the stairs. We all squashed upon it. My father, Robert always wore blue striped pajamas with a white tasseled trouser cord. I can’t recall what my mother, Ivy wore, but she smelt wonderfully of lavender. Even now, that smell brings back her image.

Our house was ten miles from central London, but I was never evacuated. Too little probably to go alone, and my mother would never have left my father, who had a heart condition. Night after night the three of us squeezed onto my mattress. I renamed it, ‘my flying carpet’.

Under the stairs was a tiny window tacked over with blackout. The cupboard had been designed as a pantry. But now it was our air raid shelter. Using a dim torch covered with black tissue paper, we played games like Snakes and Ladders or Ludo. As we did so, the deafening drone of a vast army of aircraft overhead was accompanied by the whistle of falling bombs and the crump of constant explosions.

It never occurred to me that I was in danger. My parents stayed calm and cheerful and I had a funny mask to wear, designed like Mickey Mouse. When the ‘All Clear’ sounded we emerged, my father first, sniffing the air cautiously as he opened the slant shaped door leading to the hall.

One morning after a particularly heavy raid, my father took my mattress upstairs but did not return at once. My mother and I found him staring at the trap door to the loft which had somehow been blasted down through the ceiling onto my bed, where my head usually lay. We soon discovered that not one house on our Estate had escaped damage, most far worse than our own dust and cracked windows. King George the Sixth and Queen Elizabeth visited. I still have the tiny black and white snapshots my father took at the time, showing the King and Queen viewing scenes of devastation.

My last ‘under stairs’ memory is the time of the ‘Doodlebug’. By now I was picking up the palpable tension in the air after the chugging noise stopped, and cried without knowing why. To distract me, my mother picked up a pencil used to note meter readings and drew a sketch of ‘Bambi’ on the cream distempered wall. My father was not amused.

‘Indelible that pencil’, he grumbled. ‘It will never come off’.

He was right. ‘Bambi’ remained till I grew up, a reminder of my wartime childhood, like rabbit pie, no bananas, and ‘Itma’.

The house is long since sold, but ‘Bambi’ stays forever sketched in my memory, like those rides on my ‘flying carpet’.

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