大象传媒

I was 11+ when war was declared. I had just obtained a place the County grammar school at North Walsham and was due to start there at the beginning of September, but the beginning of term was delayed for 2 weeks because of the declaration of war. This seemed like a lifetime to me, as I was so excited to be going to my new school.
When the term did begin and I had to travel on the train for about 30 minutes to school every day, the war seemed a long way away.
Then the air raids began. At first we were just the target of German planes returning to base with some of their bomb load still aboard and they dropped them on Cromer as they crossed on to the North Sea.
On one occasion I was in the garden with my father and I saw a plane coming towards us in a steep dive. I said " Oh look that plane has black crosses on it!" My father said "Run"! and we both rushed indoors just before the plane straffed the street with machine gun bullets.
Then the night time raids started. My brother was in the St John Ambulance brigade, although he was only 15 years old. On the night of the worst raid I can remember, there was a series of explosions and the house shook and the windows fell in. I went to see if my brother was OK and he was rushing around his bedroom trying to find his trousers.
He went out to join his unit and my father also went out as he was an air-raid warden. After several hours my brother returned. He was covered in dust and exhausted. He said he had been helping to pull the dead and injured out of their wrecked homes. As he was slim, he had been useful to get in places where bigger people could not reach. He saw some horrible sights that night, and these were people that were our friends most of whom lived as we did, over their business premises. There was no trauma counselling then!
Another incident which is vivid in my memory was the day I was returning from school, and walking the mile from the station to the town, it was obvious there had been a raid during the day. There were houses with their roofs blown off and I later learned that on one house there had been a workman on the roof whose body was never found.
In spite of all these incidents my brother and I did not feel frightened or traumatised. In fact, like many of our generation, we found a certain excitement in the events of the war and I often think the reason that there was little "anti social behavior" was because we were all living at a time when our sense of adventure was fully occupied.

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