大象传媒

In Memory of Joey

By: Freddy Fullerton.

When Adolf Hitler decided that we in England were next on his list of
Of Countries to dominate, he vastly underestimated the determination of the British people, and their love of freedom.

I was only ten years old when War was declared, and knew absolutely nothing about what the word War meant, but I guess you had to learn very fast indeed if you wanted to survive.

My family, of two brothers,a sister, Mum and Dad, lived in the East End of London, just off Commercial Road in a little area called Planet Street. The nearest air raid shelter was the basement of a clothing factory at the top of the street.

The local authority had put a series of metal bunk beds, two high in the
Place, and initially it was, first come first served when you came down to the shelter for the night. There were about sixty families that used the place every night, and with an average of two kids to a family, things did get a bit cramped, to say the least.

One night during one of the heaviest raids on London, my next-door neighbour Joey Manning, who could only have been seventeen, decided to volunteer as an air raid warden. They put him on the roof of the clothing factory we were in, with the task of spotting incendiary bombs.

The Idea was that he would report the position of the resulting fires
So that they could be extinguished quickly, thereby eliminating guidelines for German bombers that were always following the pathfinders.

Sometime during the night, Joey spotted a parachute descending about A hundred yards away, and hurriedly came down from the roof to run towards the parachute, presumably thinking it was an aircrew
Member in trouble.

In point of fact, it was a type of Land Mine, which explodes horizontally when the nosecone touches something, demolishing everything above ground for about a hundred yards in diameter.

Jeoy had run directly into the path of the explosion, and his body was never found, they did however find his boots, but that was all.

The bomb had destroyed all of Watney Street market, and the surrounding area as far away as Dean Street, all you could see in the morning were cellars below ground level, with bits of furniture scattered about.

It was as though someone had taken a giant broom and swept all the houses away, there was absolutely nothing standing above ground level.

The building and shelter we were in was only just outside of the area
of devastation, which meant that everyone in our shelter were okay.

We suffered years of this utterly useless killing, before the Allies overcame the Nazis, and that鈥檚 why when you see destruction and death like the 9-11 tradjedy in New York, and the senseless bombings in London recently, it does make you say that the people doing it have no Idea how resilient and tough FREE people can be.

End.

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