大象传媒

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I was seven when the war started, strange isn't it, but I don't remember all that much of it? I wasn't evacuated, I don't know why, I don't remember the subject ever arising. I do remember the schools must have been closed for a while because I remember vaguely going into a school teachers front room with a small number of other children, down Beaconsfield Road in Chatham, the one that loops off Palmerston Road. I can't remember why, but for a while at least Glencoe School must have been closed. The school of course had brick shelters built into the playground.

My father was a blacksmith in the dockyard, which was a reserved occupation, working on the ships for the navy. He worked twelve-hour shifts a day, seven days a week. There were only two shifts - all day or all night. They had to keep the work going. One day, for some reason, my father changed shift with someone else, it was during the day shift and the man that changed shifts with my father was having a break, a bomb came through into the smithery and hit the man who had changed shift with my father. Had my father been there, he would have been sitting there, having his sandwiches. Just by chance he'd changed that day.

I don't remember sleeping in the air-raid shelter, like a number of people did, I don't ever remember doing that. There was no traffic on the roads at all except horses and carts.

Another interesting little feature was that we didn't just have summertime, we had double summertime, so that the clocks were pushed forward one hour in the winter and two hours in the summer. It was some misguided theory, the sort that politicians have. The farmers still got the same amount of daylight and the same amount of work, it's really nonsense. I remember listening to Monday Night at Eight, a regular programme on the 大象传媒, sitting on the window ledge as it finished at nine o'clock, with the sun still way up inh the sky, because it was really seven o'clock. One of those little things that have stuck in my mind.

I have this recollection of being in the bedroom one day, for some reason the front bedroom wasn't furnished at the time, well I suppose that my parents hadn't been married for all that long. I was seven, they'd only been married seven or eight years, because then the war came and squashed everything, but I remember playing in the front bedroom when a V1 came and stopped. They were just a crude rocket, a pulse speed rocket which made a funny bumping sound. They carried on until the fuel ran out, then stopped and fell down. They weren't all that accurate, obviously the Germans were waiting for reports of where they landed and adjusted the fuel accordingly and the direction they sent them in.

There was no control over them apart from putting fuel in them and pointing them in the appropriate direction. It transpired after the event that there was a lot of deliberate deception trying to fool the Germans about where these things had fallen, so that they wouldn't get the range correct for London. But if they didn't land on London they landed on some other poor unfortunate,me of course.

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