大象传媒

I was born in Bromley, Kent, in August 1938. My father had a clerical job with Shell (where he had met my mother, whom he married in 1932), and at the outbreak of war his office was immediately evacuated to Bournemouth.

We lived for four years in the Montague Hotel, a private hotel in Durley Road. This survives, but is today a much grander building, and I doubt if any of the original structure remains. I remember exploring illicitly beyond the green baize door which gave on to the staff quarters, and I remember the maid Amy who suffered with an unrepaired cleft palate and was unmercifully teased about it.

We had a gas fire in our bedroom, and I had a kind of low high chair with a tray. My mother kept telling me not to sit on the tray, but I persisted, and eventually I tipped off the tray on to the gas fire. Fortunately it wasn't lit at the time, so the worst was that I acquired a small scar which refused to grow hair.

My father was declared unfit for military service, for reasons I never understood, but anyway he was only two weeks short of his 38th birthday when war broke out. He was a proud CQMS in the Bournemouth Home Guard, and I remember playing with his rifle as a toddler.

The Bournemouth beaches were at some point made out of bounds with barbed wire and tank traps. I have no recollection when this happened, but I do remember my parents' frustration.

There was a daylight air raid, and I remember seeing the German bombers before we were hustled into the hotel basement. They were dropping incendiaries, and they destroyed Beale's, which I think was then Bournemouth's premier department store.

Shell moved my father's office back to London in September 1943 - heaven knows why - just in time for the doodlebugs (V1s). He stayed in the Home Guard, and did watches on London City roofs.

I shall always remember one story he told. He came off his train home, and there was a V1 coming along the line of the railway. Everyone dived, pointlessly, into the nearest bushes, but it turned away and exploded about half a mile away.

That may well have been one of the last V1s; certainly the very last fell quite near to us.

Then there were the V2s. I was aware of them, but have no recollection.

Two kinds of domestic shelters were developed, named after key Cabinet Ministers. The Anderson was dug into the garden, while the Morrison was a kind of iron cage which was installed inside the house. There were only three of us - my parents and myself - and we had a Morrison, in which we spent many nights.

My final memory is of walking half a mile to school and watching a group of (I believe) Italian POWs doing navvying work.

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