Steven Berkoff Quotes

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser.

I was born on the first day of January 1941 in the front bedroom of my grandparents' house in Rodborough near Stroud in Gloucestershire where my mother had come to escape the bombing in London.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

In the new series of 'Foyle's War,' London starts to get bombed, and the country falls under heavy attack. It affects people's sense of well-being, their sense of the future and their concerns for their family and friends.

It makes me feel like I can look the East End in the face.

I grew up in London, a city devastated by the bombing. I am, you might say, a Blitz Baby.

I was born in 1935, so I was quite young when the war started. I remember we were in Bath, and it was 1942. We went down into the cellar of our house, and when we came up, I remember seeing all the glass on the floor where all the windows had been shaken out by the bombs.

Yes, I remember the bombings. Yes, I remember, because - yes, I remember being in air raid shelters. Even though I was evacuated because I was very young, I remember being in air raid shelters and the tremendous feeling of compatibility with everybody.

Actually I was born in 1940 in Blackpool because my family lived in Manchester but Manchester was being bombed. So my mother was sent away to Blackpool to have me and then went back; so I lived my first eighteen years in Manchester and then emigrated to the States when I was eighteen.

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.

I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.

At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.

I grew up in a family full of strong women. A great aunt on my mother's side had been a matron on a hospital ship in World War II, and one on my father's side had served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

In Hitler’s frantic mental haze Already Hull and Cardiff blaze And Paul’s grey dome rocks to the blast Of air torpedoes screaming past

My childhood ended in 1942. I was 12, and for the next three years, I lived under incessant bombings. It was a life of constant fear.

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz.

I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father's tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action.

My father had been a Wehrmacht officer in the second world war and was a violent and damaged man.

And sometimes when I would get in the morning, when we'd go out - we'd see shrapnel and bits of stuff in the streets and bombed buildings, and - but I was evacuated a lot. Every time the blitz got heavy, my parents would take us off to the country.