大象传媒

I was 14 when the war started in 1939 and I lived in Highcliff Road, Gosport with my Mother and my younger brother Ray who was 6. My Grandfather who was 83 and very deaf lived alone in a small cottage not far away in Privett Road. My father was in the Sick Berth Staff of the Royal Navy and had been serving on the battleship HMS Malaya since 1937. In those days a commission on a ship was for two and a half years and we had not seen him for over two years. He was due to leave the ship and to become a civilian after serving 22 years in the Royal Navy and 5 years in the Army in WW 1. This all changed because of the war and the next time we saw him was in 1941 by which time I had left the Gosport Central School and was just starting work in Portsmouth Dockyard as an Apprentice Electrical Fitter, but back to the start of the war.
A few days before the start of the war, the children from my school were evacuated to Hedgend, near Botley. Because my father was away and my brother Ray was only 6 I persuaded my mother to let me stay at home with her. All the schools were closed then for nearly 9 months The first thing we did on the days after the declaration of war was to fill sandbags in a field at Holbrook, somewhere near the site where the swimming pool now is. That September was very hot and the work was very hard. When the bags were filled we then stacked them all around the windows of the War Memorial Hospital at Bury Cross.
I had one particular friend, Tony and we were always together. When we had finished the work of sandbag stacking, we started to go Blackberrying and we sold some of the blackberries along the big houses in Anglesey Road to earn a bit of pocket money, not that there was much to spend the money on as allth cinemas were closed.
The winter of 1939/40 was very cold and the salt water moats which at that time ran from Gilkicker right along Stokes Bay to Browndown froze over and the ice was about 15 cm thick. It was so thick tha we were able to ride our bikes along them like a road.
There wasn't any bombing in the early part of the war so after a few months some of the children started to come back as well as a few teachers. We then started to go for lessons, not to school, but for an hour a day in one of the houses of one of the other children. Then eventually we went back to school for either morning or afternoon, and finally school restarted again full time.
The air raids started in the summer of 1940 after the fall of France. First of all there were raids in the daytime, but in the winter of 1940/41 the night raids began. By this time we had been issued with an Air Raid Shelter, which was called an Anderson Shelter. It was made of very thick corrugated steel and was delivered in pieces. The first thing I had to do was dig a big hole about a metre deep to put it in, and then assemble it; not an easy job for a 15 year old. The Council would erect them, but this meant waiting a long time.
There were two particularly bad night raids on the Gosport and Portsmouth area; the first on 10th January 1941 and the second on 10th March. On the night of the first one we were on our way from Highcliff Road where we lived to my Grandfathers cottage in Privett Road. We had by this time got used to gun fire, planes flying over and the occasional bomb being dropped, but on this particular night we were surprised to see a lot of bright flares being dropped which lit up everything almost like daylight, and the guns were firing continuously. As we arrived at my Grandfathers the first bombs started to fall and as it got gradually worse my Mother said, "We must go to the shelter", but my Grandfather would not come with us. He was in his mid 80's and very deaf so didn't really know what was going on, although he could feel the vibrations, and see the bits of plaster falling off the ceiling. There was a brick Air Raid Shelter opposite the cottage, and we told him we were going over to that, but as we opened the front door, a bomb dropped close so my Mother said, "Let's go down the back garden to my Aunt's shelter next door". My Grandfather still thought we had gove to the sheler opposite.
When we got to my Aunt's shelter there was noone there. There had obviously gone to visit someone, so we huddled up on our own in the dark, whilst all hell broke out around us. It went on until about 2 am and when the bombing finished we tried to get back into Grandfather's house by the back door, but he had locked up and gone to bed!
I banged on the door, but because he was so deaf he didn't hear me, so I went to the far end of the garden and managed to crawl through a very thick hedge and get into the garden of the Pub in Ann's Hill Road, and so out into the Road. As I came out the roof of the Chemists shop was on fire, and as I looked part of the roof fell in. As I ran round to my Grandfather's front door, there was glass under my feet from broken windows, and men were shouting at me to get under cover. I finally managed to make my Grandfather hear me banging on the knocker, and when he opened the door I rushed past him to let my Mother and Ray in. Apparently during the evening my Grandfather had gone to his front gate and got someone to take him to the shelter. When he found we were not there, he assumed we had gone home, so he got someone to take him back home, and he went to bed!

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