大象传媒

Soon after the outbreak of war in September 1939 I joined Lloyds Bank as a 17-year old junior clerk at my local branch in Carshalton. As soon as the Battle of Britain came to an end the Luftwaffe switched to night bombing of London which continued every night without a break in all weathers from October to Christmas 1940. Although Banking hours at that time were 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 9.30 a.m. to noon on Saturdays we had to work many hours behind closed doors and then go home sometimes in the dark after the all-night air raid had started.
Very often we had to do Fire-watching duties which meant staying all night at the designated Post which in my case was the basement of the Electricity show room, known as The Joint Electricity Authority, in Carshalton High Street. Three of us were on duty together, I, Mr. Bennell, the local fishmonger and Miss Thain, the elderly lady who ran the sweet shop next to Lloyds Bank. At the end of the night we went home, sometimes through the tail-end of the air raid, had breakfast and a wash & brush-up, then back to our respective jobs to do another day鈥檚 work. It seems amazing now to think that we actually got used to the raids and even when you heard a bomb falling you simply went on with what you were doing after it had exploded.
In the Bank we relied on a daily letter packet from Head office in London (containing the 鈥渃learing鈥�) in order to carry on our daily business and incredibly that letter was nearly always delivered on time first thing in the morning in spite of the chaos being created all over London. The black-out was so complete that it was often necessary to carry a small torch on dark nights when there was no moon and it was cloudy. You couldn鈥檛 see where the pavement was at street corners. In July 1941 I left the Bank to join the R.A.F. and the contrast between life in war-time London and Gloucester, where I was sent for training, was extreme.
In 1942 I was sent overseas, sailing from Greenock in the 鈥楻eine del Pacifico鈥� for Algiers, blissfully ignorant of the U-boat packs that were then at their most dangerous. The journey took 8 days and in mid-Atlantic it was even warm enough to sun-bathe on deck.

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