The War by Michael Rosen

In the evening, after we’ve eaten, Mum tells about the War. “Doodlebugs,” she says, “were bombs that came flying over us – rockets, they were, and they made a noise, but when the noise stopped you knew that it was about to drop. They said you had to run for cover. If you were out, they said, the best place to go was in the gutter, lie down in the gutter. Once, when I had just come out of White City Station, I heard one. The noise stopped. They said you had ten seconds to hide so I ran towards the gutter counting to ten, and I lay down in the gutter and waited. It landed just up the road from me.” “You lay down in the gutter, Mum? Really?” In the evening, after we’ve eaten Mum tells about the War. She says that they thought it wouldn’t be long before Hitler would land in Britain but then she tells us about what happened in Russia. She says the Siege of Leningrad was so bad and that people got so hungry they ate rats. She says that people crowded round the radio because they knew that if Hitler won in Russia nothing would stop him. “If he had come here,” she said, “we wouldn’t be alive. You wouldn’t have been born,” she said to me. We listened to the reports of the Battle of Stalingrad. “You see,” she said, “Hitler’s troops were lined up here…” And she started moving the plates and jugs and sauce bottle round the table. “The Russians were here. There was a moment when we thought it was all over and the Russians had lost and it would be all over for us. But then, look—” she moved the jugs and plates again— “they won! We couldn’t believe it.” She stops. She stares. They lost millions. Millions and millions of people died. In the evening, after we’ve eaten, Mum tells about the War.