大象传媒

A bomb dropped in Portland Road in London, and my mother was there in the house with my young brother because I had been evacuated with my other brother to Cornwall. My father had a second-hand furniture shop and it was all glass - it was sort of four-sided with a door in the middle. We lived over the shop. When the bomb dropped, my mother went out and there wasn't a pane of glass left in the building. The ARP man was there and he said, "Oh, Mrs. Peckham, go back in. The Germans have dropped a bomb and it's burst a water main." The streets were running with water, but the funny thing was, she went back into the house and carefully locked the door although there was no glass in any of the sides. When she got back into the living area, she realised what she had done!

Then another night, a bomb dropped and she thought it had gone on to the roof of the house and she made my brother, who was only a tiny boy, stand up against the wall. He said, "Oh, Mum, my knees are knocking!" so she went up to have a look but there was nothing there. My other brother was 6 and I was about 8, but he was only 2 then.

My mother said that the oil bombs were the most disgusting things she ever saw in the war because the houses where they fell were just covered in oil. Eventually my father came home and took them down to Farnborough because he was in the army.

I had my 9th birthday in Cornwall. My mother only allowed us to go on condition we went together - she didn't really want us to go at all. And then my brother was ill-treated and the next lady he went to had a paralysed arm and she needed a girl. Of course he was too young at 6 and anyway was a boy, so he was billeted down the road from me. I was very well treated. It was the very first time I had ever seen primroses. I remember Pearl, the girl I stayed with, took me across the field one time and it was full of snow, and she just moved the snow and it was full of snowdrops. That was the first time I had seen them. But then my brother was sent to Plymouth and of course my mother went mad because it was absolutely bombed to the ground.

We went to live at Parkstone in Dorset. I was about 15 and I did my post-office training. I was sent to Plymouth and the only landmark was the telephone exchange. To get to it you had to go over all the rubble which was still there all those years after the war.

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