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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ War site by CSV Storygatherers Lucy Thomas and Pam Barnett of Callington U3A on behalf of Donald King. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

Part 4
NEIGHBOURLY SHARING

There was a lot of neighbourly activity when people came knocking on the door to borrow things when they were short and I remember being sent to borrow cups of sugar and bits of tea, which was a very common experience with everyone at the time. The grocer that my mother used operated a kind of Black Market where you were able to get things ‘under the counter’. This was also fairly common and if it was done in a fair way, with it being shared out and nobody seeming to be getting more than anybody else, it was accepted. Although you never really knew whether this was the case, I don’t remember any great resentment about the Black Market. There were one or two traders who were known to be grasping who made a lot of money but it was just a way of stretching things and getting the odd bit of luxury you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get on the ration.

KIDS WILL BE KIDS

I did have one contribution to the war effort but it was unfortunately of a negative kind. Towards the end of the war in early 1945, we went to Hyde Park to see a Lancaster bomber and a Spitfire that were on display there. Soon after our arrival, an RAF transporter lorry turned up on the other side of the park and the driver left his lorry there with the Spitfire and went off to see his mother, or girlfriend or something. The wings were off somewhere and put to one side which was a sight you often saw when they were being moved around like that. Of course, we kids were soon swarming all over this thing and we dismantled a good part, I’m afraid, of what looked like a perfectly serviceable Spitfire. Where there had been a cockpit cover for years, the Perspex canopy was smashed and kids were climbing in and out of the cockpit, pressing buttons and pulling levers. I always wondered what happened to the poor fellow when he got back and saw this and having to have made up a pretty good story to report what happened when he got back to his station. By this time a lot of the anti-aircraft equipment had been dismantled because there weren’t bombers coming over at that stage so I think we kids did more damage than the average Luftwaffe was doing at that stage.

The only thing I can remember with any link to D-Day was when I was down in Fleet, which was near Aldershot and Farnborough, I used to see planes towing gliders and I think they must have been training exercises. This was before D-Day and that’s the only time I ever saw any large concentrations of troops, although uniforms were very common.

We did have a couple of sailors billeted on us once. That was quite interesting because one of them taught me a few card tricks and that was very nice. They were on various courses and they’d been sent up to London to do these courses and they were there, but they had a pretty lonely kind of life really.

So at the end of the war I remember the VE-Day celebrations, then VJ-Day. For years after the war there was a big burnt patch on our roads where they’d built a huge bonfire on our roads. It melted all the tarmac and whenever they came and put the gravel on top it always came through after a bit so you’d got this big circle in the road for years and years. There was a real sense of relief, I remember, although I was only probably about eight at that time.

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