大象传媒

I was very young but the images in my mind are still bright, photographs - if only there was a print button to click on.Some are one-off events, others a jumble of repeated experiences,not easily dated.Big explosions, searchlights,AA guns, the biggest fire I've ever seen as the wooden-crate factory behind us took a direct hit, the Heinkel low enough for us to see the pilot as we lay on the ground at our allotment,the hole in our settee where the incendiary bomb passed through to explode in the yard below.

Amongst all this I had to go to school. My mother chose to keep me at home in South London where my father was a policeman. I started school during the war so knew nothing of a life without the threat of bombing. Late for school one day, delayed by an air raid, I can still see the teacher sitting alone in the Hall with a helmet on her head and I probably remember the scene because she told my mother to take me home as no-one else had turned up.That day I was actually grateful to the Luftwaffe in a selfish, childish way.

The school had sand-bagged one of the classrooms and if a warning sounded we were shepherded into this room. To our delight we were told to crawl under the desks - an invitation to mischief that distracted us from events outside.

The school survived, with only one classroom destroyed and no-one in it at the time. Next to it three streets were totally devastated by a landmine. The blast from this is still there in my head. The dust that rose from between the floorboards as we sheltered under our Morrison table in my friend's kitchen was thick and I still see it. Brian cried and I promised to fight the Germans when I was old enough.

Near misses like that were hell for my mother, who having left me at Brian's to play that day thought that we were amongst the 17 dead.It was early summer 1944. It was decided that we would spend a few weeks with an Aunt in Oxfordshire in order to give mother a break from the routine of coping.

A train ride away and the child of the Blitz found himself in a world of greenery and country living undreamed of. For the first time in my life no-one was trying to kill me. It was an experience that I can only describe as ecstatic and one that I'm sure began a love for the countryside that has never left me.It had all the components of a rural idyll, even the hand-pump for the cottage water supply and my first view of a cow.Unfortunately this paradise included a village school. It was a shock to find myself as the new boy in an established community, including evacuees.

As a London lad from a large, though half empty, urban school I was unprepared for an all-age rural classroom in the little village of Steventon. They played games of 'choo-choo' trains at break-time and an equal affront to my cockney dignity was to be given an abacus to do sums with - very babyish I thought. The teacher sat at the front with, to my surprise, a large dog by his side. After school we paddled in the river.

The war was remote and no longer involved me. There was little to remind us of it until one day the main road across the fields was busy for hours with a continuous stream of military vehicles. We stood and watched and wondered. Many years later I learned where all those lorries would have been going,southbound, in early June 1944.

Back to London after 6 weeks and a new experience.The harsh chug of a doodle-bug over our Camberwell flat drew us to a sharp view of its underbelly. It cut out seconds later and the angle of dive meant the explosion was for someone else. My parents feared the pilotless plane more than anything else as they threatened us continuously in a way that the earlier bombing had not.

The final curtain on all this was drawn for me on VJ day in the Odeon cinema when the film stopped and on the screen appeared a hand written notice announcing that Japan had surrendered. As though we had not seen enough of them we celebrated around a bonfire that night on a bomb site at Camberwell Green - one of the sites that had already become our playground and were to shape the rest of my childhood.

Records now tell me that 931 of our neighbours in Camberwell died during those interesting years. A second less on the timing clock of that flying bomb or a stronger breeze wafting that land mine's parachute and I would be on that list. I will remember them.
Terry Lilly

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