大象传媒

I was about 7 or 8 years old. It was 1941/42. My mother had died some years before so Dad and I lived alone in our 1938-built house with gas lighting (no electric) in Baglan. Baglan is straight across the Bay from Swansea - right in the flight path of the German bombers as they came over to bomb Swansea docks. We used to watch the flares and explosions just across the water from us.
Well, as we lived alone, Dad used to take me to Gran's (his mother) every Sunday. She used to spoil me rotten but at least I had at least ONE decent meal inside me and jelly and cakes for tea. Every week we used to leave Gran's house at twenty-to-nine to walk down into Neath to get the 9.00pm bus to go home to Baglan. On this particular Sunday evening after the bus had left Victoria Gardens, Neath, the air-raid warning sounded. We had got as far as the Lodge cinema in Briton Ferry when this great big policeman got on the bus (they were all 6ft tall in those days) and ordered everyone in to the brick air-raid shelter just across from the Lodge. I can remember laying out on the wooden bench with my head resting on my father's lap - and promptly went to sleep. The raid was over by about 4.00am and we all trooped out of the shelter and got back in the bus and resumed our journey home. When Dad and I got off at Baglan, we walked home through the dark street. There was some rubble in the road so we knew there'd been trouble somewhere near but we didn't know where.
Dad opened the front door and everything seemed alright and Dad said "Right, boy, let's get to bed". Because there was just the two of us, we both slept in the double bed in the front bedroom. We went upstairs and opened our bedroom door - then we saw it! Right across the two pillows was this great chunk of masonry lying just where our heads would have been if we were in bed. Of course, when we looked up we could see the sky through the great big hole in the roof and the ceiling. In the morning we found out that a house about a 100yds away from us had received a direct hit. All that was left was a huge crater. Our chunk of masonry had flown all that distance to crash through into our bedroom. The family living in the house that had been hit was just husband, wife and small daughter. The house was semi-detached and when the raid had started they put the baby in her cot under the stairs. After the raid all that was left was the stairs against the house next door with the baby under - safe and sound. Her parents were both killed. I can still remember looking at the photographs and the story in the Picture Post magazine a short while later. I still wonder what would have happened if we hadn't gone to Gran's that Sunday.

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