大象传媒

I was 11 when war started and living in Peckham S. E. London. My mother was 8 months pregnant. Hospitals and schools were closed.
My mother was sent off with other pregnant women on a double decker bus and landed up in a convent in Hastings where she was treated like royalty. She used to tell the tale of the bus driver having buckets upstairs and down and having to keep emptying them.I was sent off to my Godmother in Watford.
After the baby was born on October 2nd, Mum came back to London with the baby and I came home. I had just passed the scholarship to High School and so my parents then arranged for me to be evacuated to Reigate in Surrey where the High School had gone.
I went with a friend and her sister. We were billeted along with 3 other children on two old maids and their maid. We were almost starved and not very well treated. When my parents came down to see me they charged them expenses for the use of the clothes basket to lay the baby in.
When Emergency Schools opened in London my parents had me home again.
One evening in the summer of 1940 there was a knock on the front door. A man stood there in New Zealand army uniform - it was my mother's youngest brother who had gone to New Zealand in the 1920's when he was 14 and they had lost touch. He thought he would call at the old family home - my mother had married and was still living there.
One Saturday afternoon later, in August I believe, the London bombing started. My mother was making plum jam which never did get finished. We all went down to the Anderson shelter in the garden. The all-clear sounded and out we came.
The sirens went again in the evening - the sky was blood red. We were in the shelter and al of a sudden there was pop-pop-pop - my mother says "they are machine gunning us now", but it wasn't - at the bottom of the garden was a canal, on the other side was R White's ginger beer factory which had caught fire and the pop bottles were going off! When we came out the garden was covered in burnt paper - Samuel Jones paper factory was round the corner and that had been set fire.
During the day us children were out playing - prodding incendiary bombs embedded in the pavement which hadn't gone off!
We stuck it for another couple of days but by this time the windows of the house had gone. We then went back to Watford. On the way to the underground station I can remember seeing a bombed shop - contents on the pavement and a man blown up on a chimney.
My Godmother had by this time moved and was living in a row of cottages near the Ovaltine factory - Jerry droppeda bomb near there, missing the factory but damaging the cottages.
We got rooms in another house in another village, it was an old cottage with an extension. Again Jerry dropped a bomb on the side of the cottage, down came the extension and I am told if I hadn't put the pillows over my head I might not be here now.
We then moved up to Norfolk where we led a more peaceful life and there I stayed until I married and eventually came to Bedford.

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