Starting at seven in the morning, when children were on their way to school, the air raid siren would wail again, and waves of German bombers would roar over Bristol. As a young child, I walked alone through streets destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs, my shoes crunching on broken glass. One morning as I walked through the streets filled with rubble, I picked up a pamphlet, dropped as propaganda by German bombers the night before to persuade the English to capitulate. It showed a picture of a child with the top half of her head blown off, a victim of the German bombs. I stuffed it into my school satchel to show my parents later.
Holding tightly to my satchel and gas mask box, I managed every day to reach my class, which was deep underground in a cavernous air raid shelter. During the afternoons, the class would be brought up outside for some fresh air. We often sat on sandbags, eating the lunches our mothers had packed, and watched the dogfights between the Spitfires and Messerschmitts up in the blue sky. The silver-and-grey Spitfires and black Messerschmitts traced out white contrails as they circled one another, and we heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns. On the way home from school, invariably the sirens would wail again. I often would have to knock on the doors of strangers’ houses and stay with them until the all-clear siren sounded.
In the late summer of 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, my parents and I took a holiday in Weston-super-Mare, a small town on the west coast of England, in an attempt to have a respite from the day-and-night bombings in Bristol. One afternoon we were walking along the boardwalk, eating shrimp from paper cups and viewing the bathers sunning on the beach. Suddenly there was a roaring noise above us. Looking up, I saw two black Messerschmitt fighter bombers passing directly over us, and I got a glimpse of one of the German pilots in his black helmet and goggles. They were being pursued by two Spitfires, and in order to lighten their load to make a hasty escape, the Messerschmitts dropped six whistling bombs on the beach.
I heard the shriek of the whistling bombs as they fell, and then the hollow booms as they detonated deep inside the mud of the beach. Although the mud dampened the effect of the blast, everyone who had been bathing on the beach vanished. The blast blew my parents and me across the road adjacent to the boardwalk. I landed in a garden on my back, opened my eyes and stared at the blue sky, and there was a loud ringing in my ears. The blood was pouring out of my nose, and I felt a terrible tightness and pain in my chest. But otherwise I did not appear to be seriously hurt. That was the amazing phenomenon of the blast, which could lift you as if by a giant’s hand and deposit you in a garden without serious physical damage. In a daze, I got up, and soon discovered my parents in the same garden, on all fours, attempting to stand up, also suffering from nosebleeds and chest pains. They also were not seriously hurt by the blast.
At the time, I was somehow able to suppress the horror of our experiences during the war, and carry on day by day. However, about a year after the bombings in Bristol and Weston-super-Mare, I began suffering from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. I began getting severe nightmares and panic attacks. Even today I still occasionally experience panic attacks, generally when I am visiting Europe.
From Bristol my father was posted to the isolated farming and port town of Stranraer in western Scotland, where he was in charge of port security. Travelling by rail at this time during the war was an arduous and dangerous experience. All our belongings were in two suitcases during this move, and my father carried his precious trumpet in a black case. The trip to the western coast of Scotland took more than three days. We had to change trains because the Germans had bombed the railways connecting England and Scotland. I tried to sleep at night in the train carriage, which was stuffy with the smell of cigarette smoke and the anti-lice chemical odour of the British soldiers’ uniforms. The soldiers were with us in the train because military personnel took precedence over civilians in wartime transportation.
On the second night of the journey, near the industrial town of Doncaster in northern England, German bombs fell all around us as we approached the main railway station. The train stopped and we all had to get out and walk. During the ensuing panic, we lost our luggage, including my father’s trumpet. We walked, terrified, along the tracks as the bombs fell over the city, and finally got to the railway station, where after some hours we were able to board another train and continue our journey to Scotland.
At dawn of the third day, a cold, foggy morning, we arrived at the railway station at Stranraer. My parents were upset by the experiences of the trip and had a loud argument about whose fault it was for losing all our belongings on the way. My father managed to get hold of a military jeep, and at six o’clock in the morning he drove us to a house that he randomly chose on a dismal street in Stranraer, and he hammered on the door. A sleepy-looking woman with curlers in her hair appeared in her dressing gown. My father announced that he had a war permit that meant he could requisition a room for us for a few nights. The poor woman looked astonished, but then rallied, as people did during the war, and welcomed us in. She escorted me into a bedroom where her three adult daughters were getting up and were in the process of dressing. A small bed in a corner would be mine for the next three nights, as I shared the room with the young ladies.
Despite our initial difficulties in Stranraer, we soon felt grateful that we had left Bristol. My father heard from a colleague who had lived near us in Bristol that the house in which we had been renting rooms had been destroyed about a week after we left for Scotland and our eighty-year-old landlady had been killed. She was in the habit of opening her bedroom window during the bombing barrages and shaking her fist at the German bombers droning overhead. My father’s colleague told him that a bomb falling near her house had blown her head off.
After a few days we moved from our emergency lodgings to an old house outside Stranraer owned by two elderly sisters. Some weeks went by before it could be arranged for me to go to school, and during that time of freedom I became friends with a boy who lived on a nearby farm, and he and I roamed through the woods during the day hunting rabbits with slingshots. Once I started school, I often spent time in the late afternoons by myself on the deserted beaches, which were covered with barbed wire and other anti-invasion devices. One night not long after I had started school, a British bomber torpedoed a German troop ship that was sailing between the west coast of Scotland and Ireland. For days after the attack, I watched the bodies of German soldiers washing up on shore.
In Stranraer harbour, there was a Royal Air Force base, from which planes went out on patrol at night on the North Sea and the Atlantic. I spent time at the base and became a sort of mascot of the air force pilots. Some of the young pilots and crew that I got to know didn’t return from their patrols. I also spent time after school with the soldiers who occupied an anti-aircraft position not far from the house we were living in, and they would give me chocolate.
It was difficult sharing accommodations with strangers during the war. My mother, an excellent cook who was proud of her kitchen, often got into arguments with our landladies. And so, it was not long before we left the house outside Stranraer and moved into a house in town, renting rooms on the top floor with our own kitchen and bathroom. The house was owned by a dour, unpleasant older man. My father was usually away every night at the port, boarding vessels that came in from southern Ireland. He was searching for Nazi spies who would have entered Ireland from U-boats and then stowed away in fishing boats and smaller vessels coming in from Dublin and Belfast.
One morning, when my father returned from his shift at the port, and I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was preparing his breakfast, he announced that he had joined the army as a private. He felt that he was not contributing enough to the war effort at the port. My mother was shocked by this decision and couldn’t understand why he would do this at the