大象传媒

Most Londoners who use the Underground System, and particularly the Northern Line, know that High Barnet is the terminus at the northern end of the line. This line comes out into the open at East Finchley and the next five stations are overground.
During the war it was widely believed that the flashing caused by the trains crossing the points, particularly at night in frosty conditions,was the reason that Barnet got more than its share of bombing for an outer London Borough.The flashes were accentuated because of the blackout and looked like sheet lightning in the middle of a storm. They could have been momentary points of reference for a German navigator who had lost his way over the Thames, or avoided the anti-aircraft fire and decided to circumnavigate London to the north and then turn to head back to where he had come from, the plane then unloading its bombs willy nilly. This is my theory anyway because there were no strategic targets in Barnet save perhaps the Gas Works or High Barnet Station, which they missed anyway.
The damage caused in Barnet was nothing compared to that of the East End in fact many casualties from the East End were sent to Wellhouse Hospital(later to become Barnet General Hospital) because it was considered a comparatively safe area.There were lots of roads that had massive damage, Elton Avenue,Milton Avenue, Meadway, Bells Hill and later a V2 completely obliterated Calton Road in East Barnet. There were probably others that I have forgotten over the years.
I was born in Barnet in 1933 and when the war started I was six and a half years old. We lived in the Meadway.
I distinctly remember the radio message on that morning of September 3rd and hearing the words that we were at war with Germany. I was told by mum and dad to just listen, don't speak.
I didn't appreciate then really what it meant but I could tell from my mum and dad's attitude and expressions that this was serious. I was to learn in January 1941 just how serious it was.
That morning neighbours collected together at their front gates and talked about the dreadful news. There was conjecture about an impending invasion and the terrible consequences if this came about.My mum had lived through the First World War and had told me about the Zeppelins and that one had been shot down at either Cuffley or Potters Bar just a few miles from Barnet.
Whilst we were standing there the siren went. I was scared out of my life and was convinced that this was IT, the invasion had started! I didn't give it a second thought and bunked indoors and hid under the kitchen table.
Later I learnt that this was a practise test.
Then we had the 'phoney war', the calm before the storm. During the months between September 1939 to May 1940 we installed an Anderson shelter in the garden. I distinctly remember 'helping' my dad dig the the large hole which was a difficult operation because of the heavy clay under soil. I have no idea how long it took. He concreted the steps down to the door and the inside walls. It was fine until it rained heavily and then we used to have to bale out the water with buckets. We only used it a few times because of this and the difficulty in heating it.
We listened to the 大象传媒 Home Service at every opportunity to get as much news as possible. The news readers were well known to us, Alvar Liddel,Stuart Hibberd (the reader with the golden voice) and John Snagge who only read the news when some momentous event had occurred.
I had a large world map on my bedroom wall and I marked all the areas of conflict with arrows to show advances and retreats as I saw in newspapers at the time.This improved my geography no end and I knew where all the battles were going on as far as the news would allow us to know. I got interested in the aircraft of the time and the details of their capabilities.
I remember the Battle of Britain and the cheering in the back gardens when we believed that it was German plane that we saw spiraling to earth with smoke billowing, and not one of ours.The vapour trails in the sky and the anti-aircraft guns banging away, some from very close by.
Then started the 'blitz'. I had started my collection of shrapnel during those months from May 1940 and me and my mates used to compare sizes and shapes and it wasn't necessarily the size that was most admired, it was the jagged shapes.If you could find the nose-cone of an anti-aircraft shell that was a prize possession. A whole 'dead' incendiary bomb was the ultimate artefact.
The winter of 1940/41 was severe and the snow was heavy.Just before Christmas 1940 I caught the measles and because we had no central heating I slept on a camp bed(one of the wooden folding types)in our living room where we had a coal fire burning constantly.The snow was piled up to two feet high in the gutters as people cleared the pavements outside their houses.
The only Christmas present I remember was a large number of small soldiers, they were about an inch high in varying attitudes, some lying prone,some kneeling and some marching at the slope, and all their millitary equipment. I believe they were called 'Bluebird', the name of the manufacturer. These were my pride and joy and I played with nothing else
The air raids were constant.Every night 'Moaning Minnie'would sound off pretty regularly at around seven to seven thirty and the sound of guns and bombs would increase and decrease,the distinctive throb of the engines of the Heinkels would ebb and flow. Very close by, we believed on a mobile open sided train truck pulled by a steam engine, because there were still facilities for steam engines at High Barnet, was an anti-aircraft gun that had a very distinctive hollow sound when it fired. Being so close it reverberated through the house and shook it.
I don't remember New Year 1941 but on the night of Sunday January 5th the siren went at around the usual time. There was the usual sound of gunfire and the crump of bombs in the distance. The East End was once again catching the full brunt of the onslaught. It was bitterly cold and our coal fire was well and truly stacked up.I had all my toy soldiers lined up very precisely on a card table with their equipment in neat rows ready for the next 'battle'they were to be involved in. I never saw them again after the following events.
At around nine o'clock I went to bed on my camp bed. I couldn't sleep because of the incessant gunfire. My mum and dad were sitting in their armchairs either side of the fire trying to keep warm. Gradually as the time passed the gunfire got nearer and our local guns started to open up. At Whetstone there was static battery of heavies that again had a distinctive sound, as loud as but quite different to our local hollow sounding one.
Then at ten to ten I heard the bomb coming. I was told afterwards that no one else had heard it. If I hadn't I wouldn't be writing this sixty three years later. I dived from my bed to my dad's armchair lying on my stomach and flung my arms around his neck. The explosion was tremendous and for a second or two nothing happened, then all our windows disintigrated with their frames. Luckily we had very thick blackout curtains and the devastating effect of the flying pieces of glass and timber were stopped from entering the room. Then a huge piece of clay weighing around five hundredweight, crashed through the roof, through the bedroom floor above us and pinned me down from the waist down. Luckily it was soft because it had come from deep down from the opposite side of the road.
There were no lights now and our coal fire was the only illumination.I was screaming to get the weight off my back and right leg. The pain was excrutiating and I was finding it difficult to breathe because of the weight on my back and diaphragm and all the ceiling dust and the smoke from the blow back to the fire. My head hurt as well but that was to me inconsequential. My dad had also been hit by a large piece of clay on his neck and right shoulder and his arm hurt a lot. He had lost his left eye in an accident at work in 1938 and so with only one eye and hardly any light he was finding it extremely difficult to move around. He spent most of the time comforting me unable to do a lot.My mum was unable to do much either because of shock. I don't know how long it was before from the road there were shouts from people who were on their way to help.One I met forty years later. He had been a local garage owner who had taken someone to High Barnet Station and was on his way home when his car had caught the blast and the back of his car had been filled with bricks and rubble.He had somehow escaped injury miraculously. He was the first person who climbed through the space where the windows had been. Other people arrived and apparently some St.John's Ambulance members and it took five men to lift this lump of clay off me and out through the window space. Apparently the double bed in the bedroom above was precariously balanced through the ceiling and was about to fall through.
They carried me into the kitchen and somehow or other the lights worked. I was laid in a small armchair and examined. No one seemed to understand why I was in so much pain. They discovered a cut on the back of my head and dressed it. I was worried about our dog, a King Charles spaniel named Dinky who had vanished. Apparently he had been heard growling at intervals but was nowhere to be seen. Mum called him and he poked his head out from beneath the gas stove but refused to come out and growled at anyone who went near. I called him and he came out covered in dust from the rubble and grease from beneath the gas stove. He was very pleased to see us in the end. Our kitchen seemed at one time to be full of people.
Where the bomb had fallen on the opposite side of the road two bungalows were just a crater about thirty feet deep in the ground where they had been. The families inside blown away, one a five year old little girl named Diana. Six other bungalows were so badly damaged they had to be demolished. Others like me were injured. In total about eight people were killed. One man on our side of the road was having a bath at the time and the blast blew the roof of his bathroom. He was in such a state of shock (he said later that he could see the stars where his ceiling had been) he just wrapped a towel round his waist, put a pair of slippers on and went outside in the freezing temperature to the road to see what was going on and to help if he could. The blackout and his state of mind, the rubble in the road and the chaos all around prevented him from seeing an open manhole which had had its lid blown off, he slipped down it and broke both legs!
I was eventually diagnosed as having severe bruising. It turned out I had a broken fibula,tibia, femur and a dislocated hip in my right leg. On the strength of my severe bruising I was eventually moved by someone,several hours later,I never did find out who, such was the chaos,to my granddad's shop about a mile away.My mum and dad lived there for around six months until our house could be repaired. I spent this time in hospital.
On January 8th our doctor arrived to see me, don't ask me why it took three days. She discovered that my right leg was two inches shorter than my left and decided to try to pull it to equal up the sizes. I don't know where she had been trained but pulling was the name of the game. Someone,I can't remember who, held me from the back whilst I was lying down and put their arms under mine to hold me still whilst she grabbed my right leg and gave it a good strong pull.The scream I let out still rings in my ears. The pain I have forgotten. I think the scream prompted her to call for an ambulance and I finished up in Wellhouse Hospital,in Sunshine Ward, where I spent six weeks with my right leg up in the air with weights attached to it over a contraption at the bottom of the bed. I must have resembled something like you see in the Carry on Doctor films. I was later put into plaster from my waist down to my toes.
These weights didn't work so I had a succession of three operations which didn't work. They tried to manipulate my hip back into place.In the meantime I had been transferred to Hut 6, a set of six prefabicrated huts that I believe had been specially built to accommodate casualties from air raids. The hut was full of boys and girls like me with an assortment of bomb injuries. The camaraderie was fantastic because we all had similar experiences.
On my eighth birthday in March I was given a set of cowboys and Indians which I used for hours hiding them in the creases in the blankets, ambushing each other from these creases. My hospital doctor, a Dr. Manley, brought me loads of comics to read, the Hotspur,Champion,Wizard and others. These helped me to continue to learn to read together with the Beano and the Dandy, as all the time I was losing my school time.
At last I had a fourth operation where they cut into my leg and did the job from the inside. This worked and gradually I improved enough to be given a wheelchair to get around with my leg in plaster supported by sitting on a plank beneath my right leg.
During the time I was there, I went home in August,the air raids continued.A girl in the next bed had been injured in West Ham and during the raids we pulled our beds together with the aid of a walking stick and cuddled up together for company and security. I wish I could remember her name.
The wheelchair was a bonus and another boy and myself used to have races down a slope outside the hut and round a flower bed at the bottom and back up the slope. The flower bed was surrounded by a circle of quite large stones and we had to avoid hitting them, but one day we both hit them and fell out of our wheelchairs. The nurses were pretty cross with us as we had been warned by them not to race about.From then on racing was forbidden.
One particularly heavy air raid when the girl from West Ham and I were having our cuddles a stick of bombs crossed the hospital grounds and blew up a lot of flower beds and lawns. This frightened us to death but miraculously the hospital itself was not hit and no one was hurt. Nevertheless it just intensified our need to cuddle together in future air raids.
At last the day arrived to remove my plaster and it was done.
Visiting hours were from two to four on Sundays and Thursdays. The doors to the ward each had sort of porthole window and I remember the anticipation of seeing either mum or dad's face at one of the windows. I was so pleased and proud to show my dad that I had no plaster and I had been given my own crutches and was allowed to walk with someone's help that I jumped the gun before he could get to me and slipped. I cracked my my right kneecap and went back into plaster again.My dad was not over pleased with me! This delayed everything for six weeks. In those days it seems,healing/mending took so much longer!
I went home during August 1941 and then had three months of physiotherapy and started school in January 1942.

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