大象传媒

A close run thing.
Both Mam and her mother sang; when doing the washing, thump,thump,thump of the ponch in the tub, when cooking and baking and ironing mountains of dried washing. They were Washerwomen you see, they were the salt of the Earth.
鈥淯nderneath the lantern,
By the barrack gate
Darling I remember
The way you used to wait
T'was there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me,
You'd always be,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene鈥�

How strange that as I write this an Ice Cream van is going down the street playing Lilly Marlene sixty years after WWII ended. It was translated into English and Ann Sheldon and later Vera Lynn sang it on the wireless, which set everyone singing it. Marlene Dietrich sang it in a film. So how come enemies sang Lilly Marlene with equal liking and to the distaste of politicians on both sides. No doubt because it carries the misery and longing of anyone away from home, in danger and faced with boredom and horrors, and all this to a particularly haunting tune. Why did this stick in my mind I wonder.
Wardens recommended sheltering under the stairs as this was the strongest part of a house. A few people had shelters built but most in Cotmanhay could never have afforded one and when that icy rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall of the sirens went people got under the stairs. My Mam and Grandma put me in a drawer to serve as a cot and sat under the stairs. For weeks the sirens had gone more or less every night when darkness came as the Germans tried to wear down peoples` morale. On this particular night it was quiet and both women wondered why the all clear (a continuous siren) had not sounded. "There must be a plane somewhere", Mam said. Just then came the ever rising scream of a falling bomb and both women thought this was the end. The explosion shook Cotmanhay. There was gunfire - from the Ack Ack Battery on Shipley Common and then the All Clear sounded. At the end of Cotmanhay in one of the few dry corners of Bentleys` field a small fair had set up their tents. The bomb, from a lone German bomber, fell in the field on the left hand side of the brow of Skevington`s Lane. It tore the side off an old oak tree which we children would later call Bombed Tree. The ARP thought the pilot had spotted the tents and tried to hit them. That tree stood proud of the snow in the Winter of 1947, all else was white as far as the eye could see.

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