大象传媒

While we were living in Barking we had an Anderson shelter in our back garden and often had to go into this during an air-raid. We lived in Essex Road by the railway and there were public shelters, which I think were in the Barking football ground nearby. We found it difficult to sleep in our shelter and sometime found this easier in the public one.

On one occasion we rushed out to the Anderson shelter and left our canary hanging on our wall in its cage. Although we were not a direct hit, bombs landed on the other side of the railway tracks and shook our house. Unfortunately this caused the cage to fall down and the poor bird was killed.

We moved to St Awdry鈥檚 Road nearby and were living there at the time of my 21st birthday. A bomb fell opposite our house and although the house suffered no major damage, the birthday cards I had displayed got splattered with oil from the bomb and I was unable to clean them up.

Most houses had Anderson shelters in the garden or yard. There were also Morrison shelters that somehow were erected indoors or on back porches I think.

On clear nights there were unlikely to be air-raids because they would be spotted coming over but during a period of cloudy weather there would often be raids every night before we got a break from them.

As well as the blitz we were also subjected to buzz bombs or rockets, which were much scarier as they came without any air-raid warnings and could land anywhere. We would hear the noise of them coming then they would go quiet and then they exploded.

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