大象传媒

I was born in 1934-I had 2 brothers and 2 sisters,I was the second youngest child, my mother was a housewife and my father was a cook in the Merchant Navy and was paid only when the ship was in service, so we were poor and lived in Northam the poorest district in Southampton. We lived in a Victorian terraced house where the pavements were swept every morning and the brass letter box polished by mum each day.
At the beginning of the war my father was away at sea and my eldest brother was evacuated with his grammar school to Bournemouth. In 1940 when the bombing started, our area became a target as we lived in the dock area of the town adjacent to a margarine factory at the bottom of our garden, we had an air raid shelter and when the sirens sounded we children had to run to for safety, on one occasion
my elder sister was in the shelter on her own and had a terrifying time when she was partially buried by masonary from the margarine factory
covering the shelter door during a daylight raid, when found she was screaming as she thought she was about to die, she was 9 years old at the time.
Mum unfortunately for my sister at the time was out in the street trying to gather her flock for the shelter.
The local authority decided that our area must be evacuated and we were taken to Wimbourne in Dorset
and on arrival in Wimbourne parents and children were given a brown paper bag containing a sandwich and an apple and we all lined up and followed a billeting officer around the streets of Wimbourne, his duty was to knock the doors of all the houses and ask the inhabitants whether they would take us in and whilst this was going on it started to rain and our paper food bags got wet and my food fell on the road. We managed to get accomodation I and my younger sister with my mother in the home of two elderly spinsters and
my brother and sister found accomodation individually in nearby homes. The two elderly spinsters were hard task masters and they used my mother as a skivvy, they constantly complained about me constantly fidgeting and not sitting still on my chair, we were not happy there and
my mother had other problems on her mind, she had bought a ton of coal which in those days was like
gold when you had a young family for warmth and hot water for washing clothes in the 'boiler'. The coal was in the cupboard under the stairs in our house in Northam and she worried that the coal would be looted while our home remained empty.
We stayed in Wimbourne about 6 weeks and during that time we became friendly with a young family living in a local council house, they owned an Austin 7 motor car and ran it on a mixture of petrol and parrafin which caused a huge white smoke trail where ever the car went which was mainly along farm tracks and by roads as it was illegal to run private vehicles during the war, but mother's concerns about the coal made us return to Northam and we were the only residents in the street, the coal was still safe and our gran who had lived opposite had evacuated herself
to Chandlers ford about 10 miles to the north and
as soon as mum got a message to her that we were back she immediately got us accomodation with another family in Chandlers ford and it was from there that we watched the 'blitz' of Southampton.
We returned to Northam to check the 'coal' and met a neighbour who had lived close by and now had a home in Sholing about 3 miles to the east
and when mother spoke with her she said we must go with her to her new home and stay with her family until we found a home for ourselves away from Northam. This we did and the five in our family and six in her family slept every night in the garden air raid shelter on 4 small bunks. This went on for six months we then found a house to rent in the next street. Mum had a coal merchant to collect our coal in bags that he had lent to mum so that she could bag it all up to transport it to our new home in Sholing. A few months later my father came home after two years away.
We children went to school in Sholing and in our class my teacher Miss Bennet had a large map of europe pinned on the classroom wall with little flags pinned on the map showing the position of the allied armies in europe and the names of the
British,American and Russian generals and at night when I was awakened by an air raid and the heavy ack ack guns whilst sleeping in the shelter,
I would watch the condensation running down the corrugated steel sheets which seem to have a silver pattern and I imagined the Russians fighting in the deep snow which I had been told about by Miss Bennet. We had school buses to take us to school and all the children sang on the buses as we travelled, happy times to make up for the nightmare we lived in the air raid shelters. My eldest brother would cycle home each weekend from Bournemouth and help mum ,the two of them
dug the hole and built the steel air raid shelter when it was first delivered to us in our garden.
We had a narrow escape when in 1944 a V1 rocket's
[known as a doodlebug]engine cut out near us and we all heard the 'woosh'as it went by and landed 100 yds away
causing death and destruction.We children and
neighbours children had a lot of fun together at the time, we were very adept at making cycles from
what we found on the local rubbish tip and although the cycles were all shapes and sizes we got about and could ride easily with 3 on one bike and when early in 1944 the American G.I,s turned up living in tents about a mile from our homes we lent the bikes to them and they would give us cigarettes, chocolate, soup packets, money and so on to borrow the bikes to visit girl friends in Hedge End about a mile in the opposite direction.I knew the Americans were generous from American food parcels sent to our school before the G.I.s came, but we really did well to supplement the rations that mum was struggling with
We children had the run of the countryside as there was only one special constable very elderly who could not walk easily so he rode a belt driven motor cycle which we children could easily hide from our mischief was scrumping fruit from the nearby orchards.
One day in 1944 the American G.I.s were gone to D-Day and gradually the bombing stopped and in May 1945 we celebrated V.E. Day with a huge bonfire and a sing song whilst Mrs Murphy played the piano which was placed under a street light so she could read her music.
In 1946-7 within a couple of years of the American G.I.s going we had young P.O.W.s German soldiers
turn up to dig the foundations for the new prefabs that were being built in our area and to get some money the young German soldiers would rescue the multi coloured wire off cuts from the prefabs and plat the coloured wires into necklaces and bracelets for the local girls to buy for six pence, the war certainly brought us children an education of a kind memories of which will always be with us