大象传媒

I was only 5 years old at the time of the Battle of Britain but I have very clear memories of that hot summer and lying out on the grass in front of our house in a village about 5 miles from Winchester and watching the vapour trails of the dog-fights going on in a clear blue sky above. Inevitably we occasionally saw planes shot down and my brother and I would go to our mother and ask her to take us to where we thought the plane had crashed. Being a very wise woman, she immediately agreed and we would get on our bicycles and she would lead us off totally in the wrong direction. On one day, however, she made a big mistake and we actually arrived at the scene. It was a ME109 that had crash landed and was still reasonably intact although it had finished up in the trees at the edge of a field. The local police had already arrived as had the ambulance but I never found out if the pilot had survived.

When it came to the preparations for D-Day, we were living in the zone close to the South Coast that had limited access for civilians. Everywhere you looked, there were army units of both British and American forces that were camped on just about every available bit of grass beside the roads. As her part of the war effort, my mother had joined the National Fire Service on a part time basis and during the school holidays we occasionally had to go and spend her shift in the control room of the local station where she worked. We used to have great fun with the firemen as long as they were not out on a call and I have no idea how many dozens of times we would slide down the pole and then rush back upstairs to slide down again.

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