大象传媒

I must have been about 3 and a half years old when I could remember being told to go down the stairs to the basement with my mother and hide under the stair cupboard where we kept the coal. This happened everytime that the air raid siren sounded and I can remember my mother holding me tight when the bombing started and saying the loud noises are only dougnuts. To this day I still do not know what she meant. After one of these bombing raids I was led into the street the next day to find that a cluster of bombs had demolished 14 houses on either side of the street only 4 houses away from ours. It was only later in life that I realised how usless hiding under the stairs was.

It was about this time when I was 3 and a half to 4 years old that I was taken daily to nursery school. My mother used the same route to and from the shool and I was equiped with a gas mask which fitted in a stiff cardboard box slung over my shoulder. One day for some reason or another my mother travelled a different route and apparently a stray bomb exploded in the road that we usually took not far from the nursery. Many a time my mother said God smiled on us that day.

Children grew up quicker in war time and at 4 or 5 years old I was often sent to the corner shop, which was 6 houses away, to fetch an item of groceries which my mother had written down but on my return my mother would complain that the old duck on the corner had torn out a voucher from the ration book for which she was not entitled to. Ration books stayed with us until 1952? when sweets were the last item not to be rationed. Until then I had only seen peppermints. I must have been 12.

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