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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Jo Thomas of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Frank Carr and David Carrigan and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

Part 1 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8948578

What games did you play during the war?

DC - I don’t think children play these sort of games these days because you’ve got so many distractions perhaps with computers and television — bear in mind, we had no computers, we had no television, all we had really was the radio, so you made your own amusement. You used to play a lot of games in the street, the obvious ones like a game of football in the street, game of cricket in the street, game of rounders. What you’ve got to remember — I lived on the Shiregreen estate then — there wasn’t the traffic about that there is nowadays. If you went on the road to play a game nowadays it would be very dangerous, but then there wasn’t the traffic, perhaps a horse and cart went past now and again, but there wasn’t the petrol during the war to drive cars.

Hopscotch, we used to chalk the hopscotch on the road surface with a piece of brick — how many’s played hopscotch? You must have. Yes, well you know what I’m talking about. Hide and Seek, particularly on an estate because on the Shiregreen estate, every house had gardens and they usually had privet hedges so there were lots of places to hide when we played Hide and Seek. So those sort of things.

We used to make games up that we played indoors. I remember we used to make a game that you played with like tiddlywink counters, but we played it as a game of football. So you had your carpet in the front room and your friends would come in. You’d sort of draw on the carpet with a bit of chalk, a football ground and then you’d have 11 tiddlywinks and a little tiddlywink in the middle, that was the ball, and you took in turns; you had to flick it and try and score in the other net. We even used to cut names out of players and stick them on the back of these tiddlywinks, so we had little individual players, that was before you had Subbuteo — if anybody’s played Subbuteo. So you made your own games up.

FC — We played similar things, Hide and Seek in the street, we played a game, what we called Kick Can, we used to have an old tin can and somebody would kick this away, and while the person who was on had to go and retrieve it, everybody ran and hid, so it was a form of Hide and Seek. We also had roller skates and played, you know we were soldiers skiing down the mountains, or it appeared to be on these. But we also played cricket and football.

We were playing football one day, I think it was in the school holidays. The football match, when we played it, used to start about 9 o’clock in the morning. It went on all day and it never stopped, people left and went home and then they came back and joined in. But we were, I think it was in the afternoon, when a aeroplane came over so low — I‘ve never seen an aeroplane as low and as close in my life as this one — it came right over the field and they were waving to us out of the aeroplane, there were two engines on the aeroplane. We said ‘he’s waving’ and we all waved back at this aeroplane and he went round and came again and it sort of came over very low and we were waving again. We heard the engine misfiring, then we realised it was in trouble, and he turned off from our fields and he went over towards Wadsley Bridge. Actually I found out later, I didn’t know at the time, it crashed at Grenoside just over on some farm fields over in Grenoside. There were two air crew in the plane and apparently they were alright. It landed on a farm and the people in the farm were away at the time. The air crew survived, they were alright, but all the neighbours were running to help, carrying buckets of water and all sorts of things. There were stone walls and one women climbing over one of these stone walls had one of the big blocks of stone fall on her foot. So they rang for the ambulance, the people who were with her and apparently, the ambulance on its way there, knocked somebody down on Penistone Road, so the real casualty of this air crash was someone who was killed on Penistone Road by the ambulance. But to us, we’d never seen an aeroplane as low or as close, if only we’d known he was wanting to land where we were playing football, we’d perhaps have got out of the way, but when it was over, we just carried on playing.

Does anyone know Concorde Park? Well during the war there, one of our own planes, probably coming back from a raid elsewhere, actually crash landed in that park. We went afterwards and — you ask what did we do for excitement as youngsters — we went searching all over the park, it’d been cleared up then, the aircraft had been taken away, but we still looked for these bits of metal from an aircraft. I remember finding a piece of metal, other kids were looking round trying to find bits of bone! Terrible isn’t it? But you know when you’re youngsters you don’t realise the seriousness of it.

We used to swap bits of aeroplane, swap bits of metal you know — I’ve got a bigger piece of shrapnel! We had drawers full of shrapnel and bits of aircraft and all sorts. Of course, there was a big air crash in Endcliffe Park, a Flying Fortress came down there and there were ten people killed on that.

There was another aeroplane I remember, that used to come over. This was right early in the war, and it was a Spitfire, and he came over and went very low over the fields at the back, and all the men thought he’d crashed, and they all climbed over some railings and ran up, but he came up and he went round again, and came back round. Now we found out later that he was the son of the man who owned a big house which was down near Herries Road - they called the family Oxspring, down there, is a road called Oxspring Bank and it’s named after that family. Well the son of Mr. Oxspring was this pilot who was a Battle of Britain pilot in the war and he used to come over every Sunday morning in his Spitfire to practice low flying, and it was very entertaining for us!

DC — Anyone know Longley Park? Well, during the war there was a plane — actually it was a very old plane, that we called a Tigermoth. One of these planes has two sets of wings — and the pilot, a Polish pilot who was fighting with us, he’d run out of fuel and he had to make a forced landing and landed in Longley Park. If you know the park’s really a big hollow, the main part — anyway we as youngsters got to know about this and we went hot foot, crowds of us running into the park to see this plane that’d landed — it was only a small plane — and they decided it was going to refuel and take off again. There were hundreds of us, kids sat round on the slope waiting for this plane to take off, and just wondering how it would do it because there’s not a lot of space in Longley Park for landing and take off. But it was only a small plane and sure enough it got off safely and took off. That was exciting from our point of view!

What was your first air raid like?

The first air raid wasn’t actually an air raid, it was a practice but we’d been issued with instructions. If bells rang, there were parachutists coming down so you had to get pitchforks or whatever you could and try and defend yourself. If whistles blew, they were dropping gas and there were square boards all over the place, and if these changed colour, you knew there was gas around. If there was gas you were to put your gas masks on. There were other things, all these instructions had been given to people and a lot of people had forgotten these and the first time the sirens went, people didn’t know whether to put gas masks on, and they were doing all sorts of silly things — putting gas masks on and trying to run to the air raid shelter and your gas mask steamed up inside, you couldn’t see where you were going. To be honest it made me laugh seeing all these people running about in gas masks and trying to get into the air raid shelters. When we went to get in our air raid shelter, it was full of all the neighbours! Their shelter wasn’t ready, so they’d all got in our air raid shelter! But it was only a practice then, so that was my first experience of an air raid warning going.

Did you have to wear a gas mask?

DC — I never had to wear a gas mask because they never dropped gas, but when we were issued with these gas masks at the beginning of war - I said if you remember you had to carry them everywhere with you — you were shown at the start how to put them on and how to wear them and test whether they were effective. But I was never aware of gas ever being dropped and therefore never had to wear it in order to protect myself. But nevertheless you had to have it with you all the time. I notice you have a small gas mask on this display. That was issued to small children. For bigger children, there were slightly bigger masks, and for babies — I don’t know whether you have had an opportunity to see a gas mask that was provided for babies — it was like a big sleeping bag with a plastic viewfinder on it if you like. You'd put the baby inside and zip it up, and then you used to pump air into it. If there was an attack and you had to put a baby in there, you pumped air in so the baby could breathe. But no, I never had to wear one, fortunately, apart from practising.

What did a gas mask feel like?

FC — Very uncomfortable, you could breathe but you didn’t seem to get enough air when you were breathing, and they steamed up inside and it was very hot and uncomfortable to wear. We were fortunate that we did not have to wear them for very long, apart from the practices we had.

DC — There was always a rubbery smell to it as well and that wasn’t very pleasant, the smell of rubber close to your nose.

Part 3 of this story can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8949388

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