大象传媒

It was one morning during February or March 1943 while I was at work that a lone German raider jettisoned one of its bombs and three shops disappeared from two corners of Shirley Street and Goldstone Street in Hove. I'd heard the explosion from where I was working, a mile away in Brunswick Street East, but didn't know where it had fallen till I was nearly home for my lunch break. As I turned the corner of Clarendon Villas into Goldstone Street the whole scene was there before me. The street was roped off and broken glass and rubble strewn everywhere. I could see that it was Shirley Street that had been hit and so quickly pushing my bike over the broken glass to avoid puncturing the tires, made my way to what was left of the Shirley Press.

The corners of the two buildings; Thompson's Iron mongers and the Shirley Press were both leaning drunkenly over the pavement and all behind them had caved in. I turned into Shirley Street with dread wondering what was going to confront me. Our house was still in one piece other than a few missing windows and slates from the roof, and as I glanced over to our porch Jeannie, her face and hair covered in grey dust was sweeping the bits of debris away.

My grandmother was in a state of shock. My aunt, Jean and her mother seemed to have taken it more calmly. They had all scrambled for the Morrison table shelter when the bomb fell and my grandmother had difficulty getting into it owing to her very bad legs. I was pleased that none of them had been injured.

A little while later, a lorry with a long cable arrived at the end of the street. The cable was then attached to the staggering but still standing outside wall of the Shirley Press and in a few minutes, that familiar cornershop ended it's days as a pile of rubble in the middle of Goldstone Street.

No-one working at the Shirley Press was killed but I heard later that when the blow struck, a heavy monotype machine went through the upper floor taking the unfortunate operator with it and spilling boiling lead over his face and head and much of the rest of him. He recovered, but I'm sure that he must have been scarred for life. I was agast when I looked at the gap the bomb had left as it had been my job only two weeks before.

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