大象传媒

I grew up in a large block of flats in North London, near Holloway prison. During the war the grounds of the flats were filled with air-raid shelters. We spent the nights sleeping there and during the day playing hide and seek in them. When the V2 rockets started coming over my sister, brother and I were packed off to Suffolk to a village called Mickfield. We left behind our mother, father and two brothers, one a baby and the other too old to be evacuated.

It was a novel experience living in the countryside. My sister and I went scrumping for apples and were caught by the local farmer what a spoil sport. We lived in a cottage with no electric light and no bathroom. Fancy going to the toilet in the garden and then the man of the house digging a hole every week to bury the contents. In London our flats were new and had running water as well as a bathroom.

In the spring we picked primroses and violets from the grass verges. Our aunty packed them in moss and sent a lovely parcel of spring flowers to our mother. We attended the village school and enjoyed making friends with the village children.

One Sunday Aunty took her bicycle with me on the back to Ipswich to the Cathedral for a special service. I do not remember much about it except that on the way back an American aeroplane flew right over our heads on the way back to the airfield. I was so frightened I jumped off the bike and hid in the ditch. Aunty was not very impressed with me or with the pilot.

We stayed in Mickfield for the last year of the war. When we came home my half brother Bill who had been a prisoner of war for the whole of the war was home. I was eight and kept wondering who this strange man was living in our flat. All our old friends in London liked to ask me how old my brother was, just to hear me say foive. I had a lovely Suffolk accent.

Bill kept a diary of his days as a P.O.W. and unfortunately died in 1951 aged 33. His diaries are in the Department of Documents in the Imperial War Museum in London for safe keeping.

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