大象传媒

Identity Cards & Gas Masks
I remember when we were issued with Identity Cards, a man called at our door and gave us the brown cards with our numbers, mine was HAAQ 120 3. I think the letters referred to the town and district, ours was this officer鈥檚 120th house and 3 was me. Dad was number 1, Mam was 2 and my younger sister was 4. In books about the war Identity cards are usually shown as light blue, these were a later issue. I had one when I was demobbed from the RAF. I can鈥檛 remember being issued with a gas mask but we all had to carry them at all times. After a couple of years people generally didn鈥檛 carry them. In TV films about the war they usually try to get details right but often when it may be about 1944 people are shown with a gas mask still in its cardboard box on a string, this looks silly as right from the start as people bought or made covers for the gas mask boxes to protect them from rain and general wear and tear. The covers were often made of canvas or leatherette. Another kind of container was a metal canister rather like a large thermos flask. I once went to a place where there was a hut filled with tear gas and walked through this wearing the mask to test it.

Near the end of the War I was camping with the Scouts at the August bank holiday, it was the 1st Monday in August in those days. When most of the scouts returned home a friend and I set off to hike for a few days crossing the border into Scotland. The first night a farmer allowed us to sleep in a barn and invited us to join his family in a singsong. He played a violin and his daughter played an accordion. At nine o鈥檆lock the wireless was switched on for the news, everyone listened to the nine o鈥檆lock news in those days. There was only one topic, an American plane had dropped an atom bomb on some place we had never heard of. The news went on and on about this, no other events were mentioned so the wireless was switched off and we got on with the singsong. In the next two or three days we hiked on the hills without meeting anyone till we came to a bus stop with people waiting. We decided to catch the bus home. We sat behind a man with a newspaper and over his shoulder we read that Russia had joined the war against Japan and a second atom bomb had been dropped and the war was practically over. VJ Day was the next week.

[This story was submitted to the People's War site by Wolverhampton Libraries on behalf of Arthur Leach and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions]

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