大象传媒

World War II memories
By Joyce Gallett

The first I can recall as a little girl is when I was about three years old and sitting huddled in a tiny cupboard under the stairs of our house. There I spent many nights sitting on the floor with mom and my elder brother. We had just a candle for light. Sometimes mom would let us make patterns with the lighted candle on the low ceiling, this we thought was great fun.
You might ask why we didn鈥檛 use the air-raid shelter which was in our garden, well it was always flooded as were all of them in our road.

We lived in Birmingham and German bombers came over every night. One night a bomb must have missed our house and was a direct hit opposite, and a neighbour鈥檚 house was completely demolished, and all the people were killed. These bombsites children used as play areas.

Dad had been away in the Air Force for a long time by then, and mom only had one photo of him. However, he wrote and from time to time sent us fresh oranges, a great luxury as we had never tasted or seen oranges before.

It must have been a few years later just after the war had ended, mom answered the door one day and I distinctly remember looking up to see a strange man standing there, it was dad and he was home.

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