大象传媒

At the age of 13, I lived on outskirts of London on the borders of Kent, and the German bombers would follow the Thames up to London passing over the Woolwich Arsenal and London Docks. In 1942, my Mother, Father and I were in our Anderson shelter during a very heavy raid. Above the droning of enemy aircraft and very loud heavy anti-aircraft fire, we heard a loud swishing noise followed by an explosion. The swishings and explosions grew louder and we feared for our lives for what was to come. My Father, a veteran from the first world war, who had fought in the battle of the Somme murmured "This is it". The final explosion blew the shelter door open, and I saw a huge orange flash, followed by a showering of stone and bricks. The bomb had sliced through overhead pylon wires carrying 33000volts. It had completely demolished the house opposite, and the broken cables were now crackling and flashing on the roof of our shattered house, and on the ground around our shelter, It must have been a good 5 minutes before the power was switched off. When the men came to repair the cables they could not believe we were in the shelter. We would surely have been executed they said. Furthermore my sister Kathleen who lived only a a doors away from us, and was 4 months pregnant, rushed to join us in the shelter. In doing so, she had to pass the live cables. Also, we will never know, when using the path to our garden in the dark, how she managed to avoid the open manhole which had had its cover blown off by the bomb. The memory of that night and our miraculous escape from death will be with me until the day I die. I am now 76 and the only surviving memeber of my family.

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