大象传媒

In 1944 I was a baby so the memories recalled here are ones told to me by family members.
I lived in Rochester, Kent, close to the airfield. My grandfather, Sidney Obee, and my 2 aunts, Marj and Pat, (my mother's father and sisters) lived at Church Street, Rochester, a couple of miles away. As my father, Harry Clark, was in the Royal Horse Guards in Germany my mother, Margaret, was on her own. Her 2 sisters stayed with her on alternate nights. Pat, her younger sister, would walk several miles home the next morning, collect her satchel then go to Troy Town school.
Pat remembers that when there was a daylight air raid the whole school had to file into brick built shelters across the school playground that were cold and wet. As the shelter lights didn't work the teacher had a torch which she only used in an emergency to conserve the batteries. Pat and her school chums had to sit on wooden benches in the pitch blackness listening to the noise of planes, bombs and guns until the all-clear. A frightening experience for a school child.
My mother wouldn't go into the Anderson shelter in the garden. It was cold and damp and she thought it spooky and full of spiders. So when the air raid siren sounded she put me in the wicker clothes basket and pushed me under the stairs while she got under the dining table with lots of cushions.
One particular night in the summer of 1944 when I was about 6 months old there was a very heavy bombing raid. My aunt, Pat, has told me she and her sister, Marj, stayed at home that night. She, Marj and her step-mother huddled in the Anderson shelter while her father, Sidney, sat outside the shelter all night with a chair over his head. The noise of planes, bombs and guns was tremendous and the sky was lit up like daylight with blinding flashes. Still he sat there without flinching under his chair "keeping guard".
The next day it was found that several houses nearby had been hit. Pat didn't go to school. Instead she walked to my house and found the front door blown off its hinges and my mother clearing up broken glass from the front windows shattered by a bomb blast. My own earliest memory is of the sound of the breaking glass and the dull thud, thud of guns and bombs. So even though a baby it made an indelible impression on me.
Years after the war in 1955 I went on holiday to Germany. My father, Harry, showed me where he was stationed at Bruhle. In this country by then rubble from bombed houses had been cleared but in Cologne I was amazed to see many buildings still lying untouched as if they had been bombed only yesterday.

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