On the day of the air raid me, my mother and father were forced to do things we would never do. The thoughts still haunt me and will continue until I die.
There were warnings of an air raid going to happen which will bomb the city of Sydney and make the buildings crumble to dust while flames burnt the rest. We never thought it would actually happen, this town has done nothing to harm anyone, so why hurt us? We waited peacefully for my father to get back home from work. Everything was perfect, nothing could go wrong right? Wrong. Everything was destroyed: the buildings, families, and our souls were destroyed. I remember it so well.
Me and my mother were inside of our house when we heard the alarm for the air raid. We knew exactly what to do. We grabbed our supplies and ran down to the basement. As we got down to the basement my mum went to close the door and I asked "what about dad?" She looked at me and froze and just stared at me, a tear came from her eye and she shut the door. I knew then my dad would be killed, that he would not survive. For some reason I didn’t cry, I didn’t feel pain, I just sat there.
I heard so much screaming and explosions, the roof above us was shaking and dust was falling from the ceiling. I was holding my mum so tight I think I could have killed her. More screaming. More panic. Why is this happening to us? While we were hearing all this commotion someone knocked on our door asking to come in. They had a child and wanted protection. I looked at my mum and she just put her finger up to her lip. I knew exactly what she wanted, not to say a word, to leave the people out there alone. But I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t let these people die! I whispered to mum, "What if that was us? Huh? What if we needed help and no one wanted to help us?" She looked at me and nodded. She started to walk over to the door when the person behind the door was shot. We heard the gun fire, the child that was with the father was crying. My mother quickly opened the door and saw a soldier at the door, aiming at her, ready to shoot. I sat there frozen from fear. My mother began to cry and begged the soldier to not hurt us. He started to pull the trigger when out of nowhere a man snapped the soldiers neck.
It was my dad, he came back for us! I was so pleased to see him and so was my mother. They hugged each other and also hugged me as well. My father picked up the soldier's gun and also grabbed the toddler then closed the door behind him. The child was still crying and screaming, we needed him to be quiet so we don’t get caught again. We were trying to talk to him to ask what his name was or where he came from. He still wouldn’t stop crying, so I pulled out my toy car from my pocket and showed him. He stopped crying and began to smile, I gave him the car and said, "take care of this for me ok?". When he settled down my mum asked him: "What's your name?" He just stared at her for a while like he didn’t know his own name before stuttering,
"J-J-James" My mother smiled.
"Hello James. Sorry that you had to go through this, but where's your mother?"
"I don’t know where my mum is, daddy always says she's in heaven but I don’t know where that is." My father then told him that she's in a good place and not to worry because one day he'd meet her again. He seemed to accept this and continued to play with the car.
