大象传媒

What surprises me when I look back on the war years is that I have no memory of being afraid, except once in 1944 when a doodlebug exploded near our house and bits of ceiling started to fall on and around my bed. Perhaps before then I was too young to feel fear, being only 6 when the war broke out.
Excitement was the predominant emotion. I remember the excitement of hurling ourselves into muddy ditches on our way home from school in order to avoid the fallout from the dog fights raging overhead, (and what good views we had of them!). I remember the cosy excitement of sitting on an old sofa under the stairs during air raids. Our father told us stories and I never felt unsafe. We had a proper Anderson shelter in the garden but it was cold and unfriendly and we never got around to using it. It was exciting too eating breakfast with unthawed snow on the carpet round our feet, a heavy snowstorm having fallen after our windows had been blown in by bomb blast one night. We lost them on three subsequent occasions too.
The other exciting wartime activity among all the local children was collecting shrapnel. We became fiercely competitive. One day my sister found a whole unexploded incendiary bomb. She bore it home in great triumph. I鈥檒l never forget the look of frozen horror on my mother鈥檚 face as my sister ran excitedly into the kitchen. The bomb was later safely defused and lived on her mantelpiece for years.
Then there was the excitement of the enemy plane crash. We hurried to the scene as soon as we could. I remember the slight sense of anti climax when we arrived, There was no body, ( ghoulish kids that we were.). But there were treasures aplenty. My little brother stuffed his pockets with brand new bullets which were considered a tremendous trophy.
After the war was over we were horribly superior towards those of our contemporaries who had been sent to safe countries such as Canada and New Zealand for the duration of the war and who returned sleek and well fed with their brash new accents. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 know what we have been through鈥� we would say. I hope we didn鈥檛 keep it up for too long but I think we were pretty poisonous for a time. My parents had actually considered sending the five of us across the Atlantic to avoid the war, but after a ship full of children was sunk they changed their minds. We have always been profoundly grateful for that.
Susan Crosfield

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