大象传媒

A vivid memory for me is during my School days at Varndean School for Girls. I was thirteen years old when War broke out and if the sirens sounded during our lesson time, we had to immediately proceed to the air-raid shelters which we knew as "the trenches" at that time and we were told to collect up our books and gasmasks, which contained a survival kit, among which included horlicks tablets and a drink to keep us going for the duration of the raid. On reaching the "trenches", we then continued where we had left off with our lesson. Should we have been in the middle of an examination at the time, we had to proceed to the "trenches" with an arms length between us in perfect silence which had to be sustained until the "all clear" sounded, then proceed back to the classroom again to resume doing our examination papers still without a word spoken. More often the sirens would go again and the whole operation would have to be repeated.

My second memory of those years was when I was fifteen-years old - the year l94l and I had gone to stay for the night with my sister whose baby was then a few months old, as her husband had gone away for the night and during the War, it was quite frightening to sleep on your own. Soon after we went to bed the sirens woke us up and very soon after that we heard the enemy planes dive-bombing overhead. They made a direct hit on The Viaduct and Arches in Preston Road, Brighton directly above my sister's flat where we were sleeping at the time. I believe if my memory serves me right, several people were killed or injured that night but the three of us miraculously lived to tell the tale and my baby nephew, as he was then, is now in his early sixties.

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