大象传媒

Subject: Recollections of WW2
I was 10 when the war began and was evacuated to Little Aston in Warwickshire and spent an idyllic autumn there in the country. However, because nothing much seemed to be happening we returned home to West Bromwich for the Christmas. Although Birmingham was regularly bombed and aircraft droned overhead we were not attacked and soon gave up going into our Anderson shelter and didn't bother to get out of bed when the sirens sounded their wailing warnings. One evening my family was all sitting in the living room. We always had a room full of people and on this evening there were about 11 of us, including my brother and his friends playing solo whist at the table. I was sitting watching them. Suddenly, I heard a shrieking sound which, having watched some early war films, I recognised as a falling bomb. I didn't say a word but just hid under the table where I was soon joined by others who managed to squeeze there. There was a nearby crump, after which we all descended to our cellar which was large and no longer used to store coal. Soon my father, who had gone out on ARP duty when the sirens sounded, came in to tell us the house next door but one to us had been hit. The house next to us had six Jewish refugees from Poland and Hungary lodging there and, because of its possible collapse,they joined us in our cellar, bringing the total to around 17. A warehouse in West Bromwich, full of candles, was set on fire and this acted as a beacon for the attacking bombers. All night long we heard the sound of falling high explosives and the crump of the explosions. I was terrified, and I think the others in the cellar must have been also,though none of us showed it and we sang and joked until the all clear sounded. Just before the all clear my father and my two older brothers, who had gone out to help, came in to say they had managed to break through into the cellar of the bombed house but, sadly, the three occupants were dead.
Next morning I went round to call on my school friend. We used to play together enacting the adventures of Robin Hood. The Errol Flynn film had not long been released. When I arrived, clutching my wooden sword, at the rear entrance to his house, which I always used when I called on him, I was cofronted by an enormous, stinking hole in the garden. I shall never forget the smell of that bomb crater. The Anderson shelter in which he, his little brother, mother and two friends had been sheltering in, had received a direct hit.
At the end of the war, a memorial was set up on the organ in the school hall of the Grammar School which he and I attended. It contained my brother's name as he was killed in the far east. It did not contain my friend's name. He had somehow been forgotten by the school. But I shall always remember him.

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