大象传媒

I was born in November 1941 in The Royal Military Hospital Tidworth, an event which needless to say I have no memory. I do however have very clear memories of pulling myself upright in a cot at the sound of sirens, of my mother rushing me down the stairs of the blacked out terraced house to the shelters on the other side of the road. I recall the noise and the bustle as other women carried or more frequently dragged sleepy protesting kids to the haven of brick and concrete beside the main street to the accompaniment of the far off thump of the anti-aircraft guns over the Humber. I remember little of the time in the shelter, I was probably asleep but I do recall the trip back after the all-clear and the brightly lit sky where the docks were once more providing their own dawn.
It is slightly more worrying to contemplate that these shelters were felled with one blow from a wrecking ball when in 1948 it was decided to get rid of them. I saw this just after we had returned from our first trip to Germany as the family of a regular army man, but that is another story.

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