大象传媒

I was born in 1937 and lived in Yeovil, Somerset, near the Westland Aircraft Works. I have no clear memory of events before 1939, but thereafter, memories come more into focus. There is a clear memory of a man dangling under a parachute drifting across Yeovil to the south, and a column of thick grey smoke rising in the east. The smoke was from the bombing of Sherborne, 5 miles from Yeovil, and the parachutist was an RAF pilot shot down by one of the German raiders. I remember sitting for hours in the air raid shelter at the bottom of our garden, drawing, being read to to and playing games in the light of a small oil lamp. The sound of aircraft engines overhead, bangs from AA guns and the wail of sirens. One day in March 1941, after circling high over the town, a German bomber dived down and attacked the Westland Aircraft Works. From the front room of my grandparent's house I saw the bombs going down on houses in Westland Road before I was thrown to the floor by my father, who was recovering from a second attack of rheumatic fever, a legacy of his army service on the Western Front in the First World War. Another day I was helping my grandfather on his land in Preston Grove, when a German DO17 bomber (I could recognised enemy aircraft by now) flew very low across the town from the west without the air raid warning being sounded, and machine gunned the nearby barrage balloon. I can still see the head of the pilot wearing his brown flying helmet, and the flicker of tracers streaking overhead as we took over in the wooden store shed. To a young boy, the war years were an adventure which came to a sudden end. One day in May 1945 I was sitting on the roof of our air raid shelter, when my friend Phillip Hamblen announced that his father had told him that the war would end tomorrow but this was hard to digest, because all I had known was a wartime life. However, VE-Day, 8 May 1945, remains a memory of cheerful people and a tangible feeling of relief - even to my eightyear-old mind. I also have happy memories of the party in our garden in the following August when VJ-Day was celebrated. At last the Second World War was over but so was my adventure!

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