蜜芽传媒

MEMORIES OF WW2 1 939
I was five wears old and living with my Mum and Dad In Clapham, South London when the second World war started.
My Dad left his city office job and became a fireman working throughout the war covering the bombing of the London Docks. Mw Mum and ! followed my school which was evacuated to Sussex and so we because evacuees in the village of West Hoathly. Ever since then I have not been quite sure whether I am a Londoner or a country boy. I love both places very much - we were lucky enough to stay with very nice people - Aunty Rose and Uncle Perce who were not really relatives of ours. We remained in contact until Aunty Rose died a couple of wears ago and only last year my Mother and I visited their daughter in the same old house and her brother who I had played with all those years ago came along to see us.
My Mum and Dad used to write to one another and whenever he could he would visit us when he had time off, often on an old push bike.
There were lots of soldiers camped around and about in the fields and woods, lots of convoys of military vehicles and one day, at a sharp bend In a narrow country road, a tank overturned and killed a young woman who just managed to push her pram with a friend鈥檚 baby in it out of the way.
Just outside the village there was a prisoner of war camp containing Italian prisoners. Some of them, I don鈥檛 know how many, were allowed out of the camp In their prison uniform: with a big sign on the back. They would walk up and down the village greeting everyone as though they were just visiting.
The camp was surrounded by a thick hedge, just like those around the fields; not barbed wire like you see In the war films. Some of us boys used to break Into the camp through the hedge and the Italians would be very friendly. I can remember them making us swings and things like that. We used to enjoy visiting the POW camp. I鈥檓 not sure If my Mum knew about it.
There was a steep wooded bank near our house, which us boys used, to scramble up and down to get from one road to another. The Italian prisoners were put to work building a smart flight of steps there. I walked up and down those steps only last year.
Later on In the war we used to see the aeroplanes passing directly overhead on their way to and from, their bombing raids over Germany. Later still, near the end of the war we used to see the V1 "Doodle Bugs' again passing overhead towards London where they would drop and explode, giving my Dad more work to do.
Sometimes aircraft, theirs or ours I don鈥檛 know, used to drop little parachutes. Perhaps they carried something nasty, we didn't know at the time, we thought they were devises to confuse radar. We used to try to get one. I never knew anyone who did but on one occasion I was out on my own homing In on one of these floating-treasures. No one else in sight! I ran like the wind, crashing through hedges and brambles, eyes fixed on this gorgeous little parachute. It was mine 鈥� nearly. As it floated down closer and closer I suddenly burst through a thicket only to see it settle gently then sink without trace into the centre of a pond.
I remember arriving first at the sight of a 鈥渄owned鈥� Doodlebug short of its target on the edge of a wood. The crop in the adjacent field was absolutely flat and pieces of metal and wire were driven right through trunks of trees.
Later on, at the end of the war, after returning home to London my pals and I had a whole new set of pleasures to experience, we used to enter bombed and abandoned houses, climb to the upper floor via the remains of the wrecked stairs and jump out of the window onto piles of builder's sand or old mattresses without much thought for the poor people whose possessions these were. Wreckage from bombing used to be bulldozed out of the streets onto open spaces such as Clapham Common. Us lads used to burrow into these rat Infested heaps of rotting belongings and remains of buildings to make 'camps-'. I can remember sitting comfortably in an armchair which happened to be upright deep inside one of these fetid mounds with utter rubbish all around me and over my head was in all likelihood some furniture just about holding up a mass of heavy masonry about to fall.
There seemed to an inexhaustible supply of beautifully made ball bearing wheels of varying diameters, no doubt from some bombed factory. They were really superb wheels so everyone had simple scooters made from bits of old roofing or flooring timber with their wonderful wheels.
Even today the smell of wet builder鈥檚 sand reminds me of the first air raid shelters being built in Clapham and the smell of burning 鈥樷�檞orked鈥� timber, that is old roofing or flooring, reminds me of the bonfires in Balham when the bombed sites were being cleared.

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