大象传媒

I was five years old when the war began and ten years old when it finished. We lived in North Kent near London and very near Biggin Hill, which was one of the main fighter plane bases. For us the war was going on constantly as planes were going overhead all the time. We used to count the planes going out and coming back to see how many had been shot down over Germany. Most of the time German planes were coming overhead whilst going to places like London and they often bombed us on the way. As children we thought it was quite fun as we spent most of our time living in the Anderson shelter in the garden and investigating bomb craters and picking up shrapnel. We didn鈥檛 have very much school because of the air raids and the school was often damaged. We had some schooling in houses and in the school shelters.

I can remember the Battle of Britain being fought over our house. Even though we had far fewer planes than Hitler we managed to overcome the Germans. London was very badly bombed and I can remember seeing what I thought was a wonderful sunset but was in fact London burning. Our Alsatian dog was a very good air raid warden as she could tell the difference between the German planes and the British ones. She could also hear the enemy planes coming from a long distance before the warning sirens.

My mother loved flowers and made a brilliant garden over the shelter. In our local park there was a gun emplacement that fired all the time. There were also two barrage balloons there to distract the enemy planes.

In 1944 Hitler began to send over from France and Holland rockets called V1s (Doodlebugs). One day the all clear had gone and my brother and I were in the shelter. We came out to see a doodlebug overhead and it looked as though it was sitting over our tree. Soon after Hitler began to send even more horrible weapons called V2s. These were the forerunners of the spaceships and these were worse than the V1s because you didn鈥檛 know they were there until they crashed. So most of the children in our area were advised to evacuate to a safer place. My mother had a sister in North Wales so my brother, mother and I one day landed on the doorstep of my poor unmarried aunt who up until then had no children, just a dog. What a shock for her. We stayed in Bangor for nearly a year going to the local school and enjoying the wonderful local scenery. It was so peaceful and we had as much food as we wanted in five years, in London we had rations but did not always have them because the shops were bombed and supply lines disrupted. We came back after I had sat the 11plus (Scholarship) in Wales. Speaking with a Welsh accent and having learnt a little bit of Welsh, this was a wonderful time for us but probably not for my aunt.

Two years after the war food was still very scarce, bread was rationed; we had very few eggs and not much meat. Because we lived in Kent we had fruit but not bananas and oranges. Sweets were strictly rationed. We didn鈥檛 get back to normal life until about four years after the war but we had a very healthy diet and we never got ill. We certainly weren鈥檛 obese! My father worked at Harland and Wolff who built the Titanic and spent the war repairing damaged ships and doing fire-watching duty on the roof, although he was an office worker and he was also in the home guard (Dads Army). We hardly ever saw him and he had to stay behind when we went to Wales. During the war I had pneumonia, which was very serious, as there was no penicillin then and I was in bed for six months with raids going on overhead.

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